Pandemic Fund
Medium-Term
Strategic Plan (2024-2029)
The Pandemic Fund Strategic Plan (2024-2029)
The COVID-19 pandemic spread rapidly and resulted in up to 30 million excess deaths and $24 trillion in economic damage globally. It revealed critical gaps in funding and capacity for pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response (PPR) around the world and showed that a disease threat in any country is a threat to every country. The acceleration of global trends that increase the risk of pandemics, such as climate change, population growth, widespread mobility, and antimicrobial resistance further underscores the urgent need to strengthen global health security through a One Health approach, taking into account the interconnection between people, animals, and the environment.
With this backdrop, the international community came together in September 2022 to establish the Pandemic Fund, a Financial Intermediary Fund (FIF) at the World Bank, to invest in building critical pandemic PPR capacities under the International Health Regulations (2005) and other internationally endorsed legal frameworks at the country, regional, and global levels, with a focus on low- and middle-income countries. The objective of the Pandemic Fund is to improve the world’s collective ability to prevent, detect, and respond to disease threats to stop them from becoming deadly and costly pandemics. Indeed, the large number of applications received in the First Call for Proposals confirmed the high demand for pandemic PPR financing through the Pandemic Fund.
Through this five-year Strategic Plan, the Pandemic Fund sets forth a comprehensive path toward a world better equipped to manage the threats posed by pandemics. By leveraging its unique position, prioritizing its resources, and fostering an environment of collaboration and inclusivity, the Fund aims to address the complex nature of pandemic PPR and safeguard global health security for all.
Unique value proposition
The fund will add value to the pandemic PPR landscape by:
Filing Capacity Gaps
By targeting discrete areas within pandemic PPR that benefit from additional funding and coordination, strengthening institutional enablers for those areas, and embedding a focus on equity and inclusion, community and civil society engagement.
Fostering Coordination
Across the range of pandemic PPR actors, across sectors in countries, and across countries and regions to share learnings, with the goals of sharing learnings, driving coherence of funding streams, and ensuring multi-sectoral collaboration for a whole-of-government, One Health approach.
Mobilizing Additive Investment
By catalyzing co-financing from international partners, incentivizing co-investments from countries themselves, and attracting private sector investments, aligned with country/regional needs and plans, and thereby maximizing sustained investments in pandemic PPR.
Flexibility and Responsiveness
Demonstrating flexibility and responsiveness to evolving contexts and priorities within the pandemic PPR landscape to ensure strategic initiatives remain relevant and effective.
Impact ambition
Recipient countries and regional/global networks are better prepared to prevent, detect, contain, and rapidly respond to pandemics over the next five years.
The Pandemic Fund’s impact will be measured by the following indicators:
- Number of recipient countries and regional/global networks with improved pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response capacity.
- Number of people protected through improved pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response capacity.
Focus areas
The Fund will focus its investments on the following areas while ensuring its investments take a systems approach - efforts will be mainstreamed into health systems with benefits beyond disease - specific areas.
Three programmatic priorities
Surveillance, laboratory systems, and health workforce are critical, underfunded building blocks of pandemic PPR with opportunities to complement existing initiatives
Two cross-cutting enablers
National Public Health Institutes (or relevant public institutions) and regional/global networks, organizations, or hubs are coordinated systems and institutions that support the resilience and sustainability of the programmatic priorities.
Four underlying themes
One Health, community engagement, gender equality, and health equity will be integrated across the Fund’s work to encourage a whole-of-government and equitable approach that safeguards vulnerable populations.
Input from over 400 stakeholders informed the development of the Strategic Plan, including from:
- Governing Board members and their constituencies
- Technical Advisory Panel members and Implementing Entities
- Non-governmental organizations, community and civil society representatives
- Academia and research and training institutions
- Multisectoral stakeholders (Ministries of health, livestock, agriculture, finance, and others)
- The private sector
Resource allocation
Key principles
- Remain open to supporting all low-and middle-income countries.
- Deploy resources for maximum impact.
- Increase predictability of funding, ease of access, and reduce transaction costs.
- Increase coordination with other pandemic PPR funders and crowd-in project financing by introducing new modalities.
- Remain flexible to provide response financing according to future developments in the global health architecture.
Geographic prioritization
In the medium term, the Fund will dedicate the majority of its resources to countries with the largest gaps in pandemic PPR capacity, highest pandemic risks, including burden of disease, taking into account socioeconomic context.
Remaining resources will be available for other low- and middle-income countries and regional and sub-regional entities (and global entities, as resources allow).
Catalyzing additional funding
The Fund will mobilize additive and synergistic funding to the pandemic PPR landscape. By looking beyond traditional funding sources towards innovative financing mechanisms and partnerships with the private sector and other contributors, the Fund will continue to be a critical catalyst in growing overall investment in pandemic PPR.
Cooperation, coordination, collaboration
Strategic vision
- Center countries while driving coherence in funding streams.
- Deliver unique value by providing complementary financing to close gaps in PPR and advance ecosystem knowledge.
- Leverage existing mechanisms and networks to complement their efforts, accelerate timeline to impact, and share best practices..
- Advance innovation and advocacy efforts through sharing of learnings and evidence.
- Remain agile and collaborative with parallel global health initiatives
One of the unique value propositions of the Fund is to foster cooperation, coordination, and collaboration across a diverse range of actors to drive coherence in the pandemic PPR landscape.
Governance & Stakeholder engagement
The Pandemic Fund will build on its inclusive governance structure to increase diversity of voices represented, focusing on co-investors and civil society engagement.
The Fund will also promote greater transparency and accountability of its operations, engagements, and investments.
Co-investors
The Fund will help co-investors self-organize, facilitate support for bi-directional communication with constituencies, and lessen barriers to participation.
Civil society
The Fund will ensure civil society's involvement in decision-making and throughout project lifecycles, recognizing their crucial role in advocacy, resource mobilization, and community engagement.
Transparency & accountability
The Fund will expand its efforts to proactively publish key documents (e.g., approved proposals, M&E reports, financial disbursements) and its progress against the M&E framework.
The Strategic Plan is a living document, remaining adaptable to major shifts in the broader pandemic PPR landscape. It will be reviewed on a regular basis to measure progress against the Fund's Monitoring and Evaluation framework.
