"I welcome all our readers with great excitement to this maiden edition of the African Health Economics and Policy Association newsletter. When we were preparing to set up our association, one of the key reasons we settled on the Af-HEA acronym was its close resemblance to the Swahili word for health, afya, which is also the word for health in several other African lan-guages. It seems therefore appropriate that our newsletter should be called Afya.Afya will serve primarily to inform our members and our other stakeholders about Af-HEA and what it does. More broadly, and in time, it could also be a tool for information sharing and exchange among members, promoting relevant activities and notifying readers of upcoming conferences, workshops and other events. It will also support the dissemina-tion of high quality research findings by health economists and health policy analysts working in Africa and on Africa-related issues, in subsequent editions by publishing a list of recent publications of mem-bers and the journals where such can be found. However, Afya is not meant to be a scien-tific publication but will point readers to such publications."