Ahead of next year’s WHO-led treaty on pandemics, our Pandemic Preparedness project and Covid Collective initiative – both examples of what can be achieved through agile partnering and collaboration – have underlined the need to make responses equitable, ethical and locally-based.
Collaborating with impacted communities to explore solutions
How countries prepare for the next pandemic has concentrated minds in various international forums over the past year. However, local people’s understandings of these diseases and their knowledge in preparing for them is often ignored. IDS was a lead partner in Pandemic Preparedness, a four-year programme researching preparedness ‘from below’. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, it explored different meanings and practices of preparedness and learned from people living with multiple health-related uncertainties in settings in Africa.
Global and regional research was carried out alongside local-level research that took place in villages in Sierra Leone and Uganda. This fieldwork included oral histories and participatory research to track how people currently understand and deal with health events and threats.
Key findings from the project were shared in a public webinar ‘Shifting Power in Pandemics’. Held in November 2022, this online event sought to further discussion on the kinds of efforts and global-local relations needed to strengthen, build and integrate local-level preparedness.
Our partners on the Pandemic Preparedness programme included Centre Régional de Recherche et de Formation à la prise en charge de Fann (Senegal), Institut de recherche pour le développement (France), London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (UK), Njala University (Sierra Leone) and Gulu University (Uganda).
Influencing debates ahead of a global pandemic treaty
Coordinated by IDS and funded by the UK FCDO, the Covid Collective Research Platform initially brought together the expertise of eight global partner organisations. However, since its inception three years ago, it has expanded to 35 partners, working across 65 projects in 39 countries. In its final phase, the project supported a hard-hitting report urging world leaders to look beyond conventional staples of the public health toolkit when drafting a new WHO-led global treaty on pandemics. They called for a more people-centred strategy of preparedness and offered a radical five-point action framework.
The flagship report – Pandemic Preparedness for the Real World – was published in March 2023 to mark the third year of the Covid-19 pandemic.
It criticised pandemic approaches as having been reactive and top-down in nature and overly reliant on technological ‘solutions’. The report drew on a large and growing body of social science research undertaken during the pandemic, in locations from urban northwest London to rural Zimbabwe.
Also published in 2023, the People’s Agenda for Pandemic Preparedness report is the result of a collaboration between over 50 researchers from 25 countries across six continents into people’s priorities for recovery from the pandemic. Protection for the most vulnerable, support to recover livelihoods and health, and help to get young people back on track were widely shared concerns. The report is an example of IDS utilising its position and networks to bring together key actors to collate and distribute knowledge.
In March 2023, IDS met with Covid Collective partners from across 65 projects to discuss emerging themes from the programme, including pandemic preparedness and social protection. Raquel Cronopia, an illustrator, was commissioned to capture key discussion points. To see the illustration in full, and find out more about the initiative, visit covid-collective.net.
