Creating an enabling
environment for
research
2. Shaping the global research agenda
TDR engages a wide range of stakeholders, including scientists, funders and governments, to shape the global research agenda on infectious diseases of poverty. This section highlights TDR’s efforts in identifying and prioritizing key research areas, ensuring open and equitable access to scientific data and literature, and fostering an inclusive and equitable research environment. Furthermore, TDR supports efforts to harmonize investments in building research capacity and plays an influential role in the global debate around key health issues via the Global Health Matters podcast. These initiatives collectively drive impactful and inclusive research efforts.
Objective
To support the generation of evidence that strengthens epidemic preparedness and the resilience of health systems.
Key activities
- Supporting research priority setting exercises.
- Facilitating equitable open science through research data sharing platforms and open access to research literature.
- Promoting an inclusive infectious disease research agenda that recognizes the health needs of women, girls, men, boys and people in all their diversity, including those with non-binary identities.
- Facilitating the harmonization of funders’ investments in research capacity through the ESSENCE on Health Research initiative.
- Influencing the global debate around key health issues through the Global Health Matters podcast.
2024 updates
- An opinion article published in the BMJ on the occasion of TDR’s 50th anniversary discussed the Programme’s commitment to and progress on advancing inclusive internationalism in health research. (See Spotlight story below.) A forthcoming BMJ Collection brings together a wide range of stakeholders to advance ideas, debates and actions needed to achieve true equity in global health research.
- TDR is contributing to WHO’s research priority-setting exercises in knowledge translation and evidence-informed policy-making and those led by the Global NTD Programme and Department of Traditional, Complementary and Integrative Medicine.
- TDR is leading an initiative to develop guidance to incorporate an intersectional gender lens in ethics review committee evaluations.
- TDR has contributed a chapter on research and data sharing during health emergencies to a new open access eBook entitled Principles and practice of emergency research response.
- The Global Health Matters podcast, with 40 episodes produced as of December 2024, is reaching listeners in more than 180 countries. A commentary published in Nature Medicine discussed “Podcasts as a tool to disrupt knowledge hierarchies and silos to decolonize global health.”
Clockwise from top left: Ricardo Baptista Leite, Ayoade Alakija, Wilfried Mutombo, Yasmine Belkaid, John Reeder, Francine Ntoumi and Corine Karema.
All photos courtesy of guests except for John Reeder Credit: TDR/Antoine Tardy
Spotlight
TDR at 50: advancing a longstanding commitment to inclusion
(published in the BMJ on 28 May 2024)
Calls for inclusivity in health research have been intensifying in recent years. The moves reflect awareness of the importance of creating more equitable and collaborative international partnerships and ensuring that diverse voices, especially from LMICs, are heard and included in all stages of the research process.
Top photo: Scientists searching for mosquito larvae in the Peruvian Amazon.
Credit: Freddy Alava
Bottom photo: African researchers trapping tsetse flies responsible for transmission of sleeping sickness.
Credit: WHO/T. Land
