Crucial to the success of the 100 Days Mission is its global relevance. As part of our commitment to ensuring the 100DM is widely applicable and beneficial, the IPPS held a series of four regional ‘listening exercises’ over the summer, to better understand different regional contexts and approaches to delivering the 100 Days Mission.
Today, we are pleased to publish the summary reports from each of these listening exercises, which were hosted virtually together with regional partners and facilitated by Colab International.
The events provided valuable insights into the strengths and challenges within different regions, featuring in-depth discussions with a diverse set of expert participants, focusing on South and Southeast Asia, West Africa, East Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean respectively.
Participants were asked to highlight examples of previous successes in fighting pandemics and epidemics in their region, consider the current challenges and barriers to effectively implementing the 100DM, how to ensure equity at each stage of countermeasure development and delivery, and how local and national systems can best interact with regional and global systems.
Common themes that emerged across all four exercises included:
– The criticality of regional governance institutions to connect the national to the global, and to increase solidarity and distribution of support in economically diverse regions.
– The need for regulatory capacity–building and the value of regional regulatory harmonisation to boost local product development.
– A strong desire from national representatives to work collaboratively with other partners in their region and make a virtue of their differing strengths to develop a regional end-to-end product development system.
– A desire for more infrastructure and frameworks to support the technical cooperation that had worked well during COVID-19, but could now be formalised through digital platforms or shared projects, such as the development of regional product libraries.
– Support for the strengthening of regional manufacturing is growing in all four regions, albeit at different rates; this contrasts with early-stage R&D investments, where funding and infrastructure are more uneven.
– The need for effective, equitable and sustainable financing systems.
– The centrality of strengthening community health systems for surveillance, response, effective clinical trials and building trust in medical countermeasures.
– The importance of strong regional representation in global decision-making processes on medical countermeasures, especially INB, G7 and G20 discussions.
The full summaries from each region, translated into French, Spanish and Portuguese where relevant, can be downloaded here.
The outcomes of these listening exercises will also feature in the 100 Days Mission Annual Implementation Report, to be published in January 2024.
We would like to thank our partners who supported the delivery of these events:
– Ministry of Health, Singapore
– Pan American Health Organization (PAHO)
– Fiocruz
– Instituto Todos pela Saúde (ITpS)
– Pandemic Action Network (PAN)
– Uganda Virus Research Institute (UVRI)