Emergency organizations and agencies often operate in silos, meaning that essential information, resources and expertise become isolated. As a result, inefficiencies and duplicated efforts impede timely and comprehensive aid delivery, slow sector-wide progress and ultimately exacerbate the negative impacts of crises on affected populations
The challenge
The solution
The INITIATE project brings together over 20 partner organizations to design and develop innovative solutions for tackling health emergencies, including infectious disease outbreaks.
INITIATE is co-managed by WFP and WHO and hosted by the United Nations Humanitarian Response Depot (UNHRD) in Brindisi. It aims to bring together global partners to promote knowledge sharing and skill transfers for an improved emergency response to health crises. The collaboration’s first innovation, an infectious disease treatment module, allows stakeholders to rapidly deploy and run treatment centers in the field when an outbreak emerges.
INITIATE is based on two interconnected workstreams: technical innovation for the design and development of standardized technical solutions and training and simulation for the development of standardized procedures and response capacity.
As the convenors of the initiative, WFP and WHO have developed the project governance structures, provided technical expertise and engaged key partners. The WFP Innovation Accelerator supported the inter-agency project management team by promoting the end-to-end human-centered collective design process. From facilitating workshops to advancing the overall vision and capturing key learning, the WFP Innovation Accelerator’s role has been key to progressing this initiative.
Impact
In June 2023, WFP and WHO completed six days of workshops and testing on the first near-complete version of the Infectious Disease Treatment Module at the UN Humanitarian Response Depot (UNHRD) hub in Brindisi, Italy. Over 70 participants from partner organizations joined to test medical and logistics scenarios and co-develop the final structure. Various partners expressed the game-changing potential of this module for medical workers in emergency response to infectious diseases and that it was the first time that many of them had worked in such a collaborative manner.
What's next for INITIATE?
The Infectious Disease Treatment Module will be tested further in November 2024 in Accra, Ghana, through a full-scale simulation with a local medical response team to showcase the final structure and test its intuitiveness and usability.
Additionally, the INITIATE partners will continue to push forward progress on the second innovation of the programme, where the partners will explore re-designing PPE products to further improve the emergency response to infectious disease outbreaks.
