The World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Development Innovation Alliance (IDIA) have agreed to renew their strategic Collaborative Agreement to support the scaling of health innovations to the end of 2025 to jointly accelerate health impact.
"This partnership demonstrates a convergence of diverse expertise, pooling resources to bolster governmental efforts to scale-up innovative solutions, leveraging each other's strengths. As a Member State organization, WHO can help governments identify public health demand in countries, while IDIA's unique network of innovation funders supplies a pipeline of demonstrated, impactful innovations," says Jeremy Farrar, Chief Scientist at WHO.
The collaboration was established in the beginning of 2021 to create a shared agenda and enable close collaboration and complementarity between the two entities to promote and facilitate the demand, supply, assessment and scale-up of proven health innovations for the benefit of low- and middle-income countries.
"We're excited to advance on our excellent collaboration with the International Development Innovation Alliance. Together, we promote an equity focused innovation ecosystem that is driven by what governments and their people need. The Call to Action for Health Innovation Scale-Up by the Public Sector, which we co-created, provides a concrete guide for governments in taking this vision forward," said Louise Agersnap, Head of WHO Innovation Hub.
WHO supports its 194 Member States to link impactful innovations to where they are most needed in countries. Given IDIA's unique experience and status as a key collaboration platform for innovation funders around the world, the collaboration accelerates collective impact in tackling the greatest challenges in global health.
"We've seen many exciting milestones achieved through this partnership, including the co-design of the first ever World Health Innovation Forum in India in November 2023, which really helped to put the importance of scaling up innovations through public health systems on the map," said Thomas Feeny, Director of the IDIA Secretariat at Results for Development. "Continuing to facilitate this collaboration between IDIA and the WHO is now more important than ever in order to start meeting the demand for assistance on this challenge that we are seeing from more and more governments around the world.";
Dr Karlee Silver, IDIA Founding Member and CEO of Grand Challenges Canada, added, "We are very pleased to renew the strategic partnership between IDIA and the World Health Organization. WHO plays an essential role in supporting governments to identify national health needs and priorities. As innovation funders, we see WHO as having the potential to help health innovations to reach impact at scale, and we look forward to working with them as they realize that potential.
Collaboration between IDIA members and WHO covers the following five areas:
- innovation demand: jointly collaborate in support of WHO Member States to enhance the identification and articulation of demand for innovation responding to national health needs and priorities and global targets;
- innovation supply: IDIA member agencies will contribute relevant innovations from their collective pipelines to meet the demand and innovation in health priorities articulated by WHO Member States;
- innovation assessment: WHO and IDIA will share expertise and tools to support the efficient assessment and clustering of scale-ready innovations surfaced through the supply pipeline;
- innovation scale-up: work together to identify specific opportunities to support the demand-led scale-up of health innovations for the benefit of WHO Member States in collaboration with non-state actors and members of the international development community, as appropriate; and
- innovation and scaling skills development: join forces to support the continuous development of innovation and scaling knowledge and skills among WHO staff (HQ, regional and local), Member States and development partners as may be appropriate.
About the World Health Organization (WHO)
WHO is the directing and coordinating authority on international health within the United Nations system. Working with 194 Member States, across six regions, and from more than 150 offices, WHO staff are united in a shared commitment to achieve better health for everyone, everywhere.
About the International Development Innovation Alliance (IDIA)
IDIA is a unique collaboration platform that brings together the senior leadership from the innovation teams, labs, and departments of some of the world's leading development agencies.
