The Kigali Summit for Disease Prevention, held in Kigali, Rwanda, in 2023, was a defining moment in global health. This Summit convened governments, the United Nations, academia, and the private sector to catalyze new collaborations scale up disease prevention, and save millions of lives. Global leaders emphasized the need to build partnerships to address key health challenges that RSVPM faced in the past. This article contextualizes the new partnerships and initiatives launched at the Kigali Summit, detailing current and future actions, and their potential implications for global disease prevention.
The Significance of the Kigali Summit
Arriving at this moment, the Kigali Summit for Disease Prevention was held in a world still on the cusp of unprecedented globalization and growing health threats. The COVID-19 pandemic further highlighted the need to coordinate the world’s response to infectious diseases and showcased the weak points and strengths of the global health system. The Summit came as a clarion call to learn lessons from the pandemic to work together to prevent and control infectious diseases.
Key Themes and Objectives of the Summit
The summit focused on several critical themes:
Building Healthy Societies: Promoting social cohesion, inclusiveness, and shared values across diverse populations to protect the public from health threats and promote well-being.
Innovative Technologies: Leveraging cutting-edge technologies and data analytics to improve disease surveillance and response.
Equitable reach: Ensuring that interventions and products are available to everyone, everywhere, especially in areas with the highest need.
Collaborative Research: Promoting joint research initiatives to advance understanding and treatment of diseases.
Major Partnerships Forged at the Summit
1. Global Health Security Initiative
The Kigali Summit also set up the Global Health Security Initiative (GHSI), a partnership among governments, international organizations, and the private sector that seeks a ‘collective opportunity to enhance global health security through concrete and collaborative actions’, in the words of the strategic plan. Its core features include:
Upgraded Surveillance Systems: This part of the initiative emphasizes building the capacities of existing global surveillance networks so they are capable of detecting and responding to outbreaks at their source before they spread worldwide.
Joint Research Programmes: Collaborative research relationships have been formed to develop new vaccines, techniques, and diagnostic tools to respond to threats from emerging and re-emerging diseases.
Training and building capacity: GHSI programs provide training to health workers in low- and middle-income settings, and aim to strengthen health infrastructure in these settings.
2. The African Alliance for Health Innovation
As its grand finale, the summit launched the African Alliance for Health Innovation: an innovative partnership of African governments, regional health organizations, and global tech firms. This alliance aims to achieve the following:
Hubs of innovation: setting up innovation hubs in cities and towns across Africa to develop locally born and bred health solutions and technologies.
Medicines and Vaccines: Working Together for Africa’s Access to Essential Medicines and Vaccines.
Support for Startups: Funding and mentorship to health tech startups in Africa will build an ecosystem for next-generation innovations.
3. The Global Health Equity Coalition
Health inequity was one of the overarching themes of the summit and as a result, the Global Health Equity Coalition was formed to address inequities in access to health and its outcomes by:
Advocacy and Policy Development: Trying to guide health policy development at a national and international level.
Investment: Ensuring equitable allocation of resources to improve outcomes in underserved populations and geographic areas and reduce health disparities.
4. The Global Network for Pandemic Preparedness
In light of the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Global Network for Pandemic Preparedness was developed to improve global pandemic preparedness by, among other things:
Advanced Collaborative Early Warning Systems: Designing and deploying new early warning systems for pandemic detection.
International Coordination: Improving coordination between countries and organizations for a unified response to emerging threats.
Research and Development: Investment in research to understand pandemic risks and develop remedies (eg, universal vaccines and treatments).
Impact and Future Prospects
These partnerships, forged at the Kigali Summit, have the potential to alter, forever, the history of how to prevent disease around the world… and how to do so more effectively, more efficiently, and more quickly.
1. Improved Disease Surveillance
Robust disease-surveillance systems, underpinned by the GHSI, will improve the timeliness of outbreak detection and response. Linking together different data streams and using innovative technologies will improve the recency and precision of global health surveillance and tracking, thereby helping to reduce the risks posed by infectious diseases.
2. Innovation and Access
The African Alliance for Health Innovation and endeavors like it will promote innovation in and of Africa and ensure that new health technologies move quickly to those who need them most. One thing is certain: the best way to achieve equitable health outcomes across all regions is to foster local innovation and remove systemic barriers to accessing healthcare.
3. Addressing Health Inequities
Focusing on equity, as the Global Health Equity Coalition intends to do, should help correct longstanding imbalances in access and outcomes to resources in health. Pushing for policy reform and reallocating resources to areas that have been underserved are good steps in the right direction.
4. Pandemic Preparedness
Finally, the Global Network for Pandemic Preparedness will improve global capacity for addressing future pandemics. The network will involve a group of research activities that will enable health organizations in developing countries to be prepared for the next health crisis, and supply the pharmaceuticals for mitigating the devastation that future pandemics will undoubtedly unleash, and the organizations to deliver them.
Challenges and Considerations
The agreements created at the Kigali Summit, while a vital step in the right direction, have issues to resolve:
Coordination and Integration across multiple entities and stakeholders can be complex and time-consuming.
Sustainable Funding: Enduring and stable funding for these partnerships is required for all involved.
On-the-ground implementation: bringing about change in the local context, taking account of locally appropriate priorities and practices means ongoing negotiation and adaptation.
As the Kigali Summit for Disease Prevention showed, we can achieve more to improve health by being engaged in global collaborations than when we go it alone. The new partnerships announced at the summit reflect our common political will to strengthen health systems, foster innovation, and increase equity. Collectively and jointly, they will pave the way to improved global disease prevention, among other health benefits.
The success of these partnerships will continue to depend on the ability of all stakeholders to work together, to do it well, and to stay with it over time. The global health community can move toward a more equitable and robust system that can meet health challenges both today and tomorrow.
