The philosophy underlying the activities of the Global Health Policy Partnership
Currently, ‘Global North’ think tanks, research centres, forums, and summits have disproportionate power in shaping the advice given to and decisions made by foundations, bilateral funders, governments, UN institutions, multilateral and regional development organisations. Indeed, those who secure large resources from their own governments for their activities often get the biggest voice when decisions on major global initiatives are being made.
Even when groups work together, differences in organisational capacity are perpetuated by the way resources flow primarily through global north partners to global south partners, sustaining inequity in power within partnerships that keeps LMIC partners all too often in junior positions.
Breaking away from this requires concerted effort and a willingness to let go.
The vision is for a ‘policy-focussed’ partnership that is hierarchy light with financially modest demands that:
- Does not overemphasise any one partner, and is globally inclusive.
- Supports local ownership of solutions by those who are charged with implementing those solutions and not distant ownership by ‘experts’ however well intentioned and informed.
- Enables two-way sharing of lessons, from low-income to high-income countries and from high-income to low-income countries.
- Strengthens pathways to impact of all the incredible research and innovation going on across the many partners and the communities they work with.
The journey to the partnership
Since October 2018, I have brought together more than 700 colleagues from over 80 different institutions and 40 countries worldwide with – especially in recent years – good balance between ‘global north’ and ‘global south’ participants. This page gathers in one place some of the key agendas, reports, and published papers generated by these groups.
Initially, I organised this as director of Oxford in Berlin Global Health Initiatives (see links here and here) with a broad subject focus. Later I focussed on four big global health challenges (tackling antimicrobial resistance, pandemic lessons and future pandemic preparedness, digital health and AI for health, planetary health). In 2021, to speed progress and to achieve broader global (including European) engagement, we brought the global health activities back to be managed from Oxford (management of the other areas followed three years later). The phrase ‘Global Health Strategy Group’ was replaced with ‘Global Health Policy Partnership’. As close collaborations with numerous global (including European) partners flourished and new opportunities were presented, at the start of 2025 this shifted to become an independent research and policy partnership with even broader global engagement.
Recognising that achieving impact is largely in the hands of the next generation of global health scholars, policy makers, and on-the-ground implementers, a big focus has been to support (and where possible and when I am able to bring in the funding, to fund) young researchers and future global health leaders (so far four research scholars, two RAs, six summer students, numerous grants to attend workshops and meetings in Europe and Africa, two new DPhil fully-funded projects). These have been the unsung heroes of the early days of this endeavour.
Early preparation and stage-setting workshops
In the early phase (because that was the role given to me) the focus was disproportionately on bringing Oxford colleagues together, increasingly from overseas units. I organised the following workshops:
Global Health dialogues October 2018
Healthy People- Healthy Planet October 2019
Better health and wellbeing, Building a roadmap for research and action February 2020
In little over a year, and before the pandemic stuck, for these global health dialogue and brainstorm meetings, I organised 14 sessions, with 65 presentations (38 from Oxford speakers), with about 200 invited participants. Despite the pandemic (and maybe because of it) in the following year we trebled the numbers of participants.
Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR)
The global pandemic has reinforced the lesson that responses to global health threats must be preemptive, evidence-led, and multi-disciplinary. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) was a regular theme across our meetings. Before the pandemic struck, a plan emerged for a robust, no-holes-barred questioning of all approaches to tackling AMR, epidemiological models, supposed evidence, and research and policy priorities, leading to a major report detailing solutions and a call for action based on:
End-to-end mechanisms connecting and streamlining links between basic science and the research and development of a pipeline of novel new antimicrobials;
Improved stewardship of current and future antimicrobials;
Livestock and environmental hazard management, including environmentally-sustainable animal husbandry and alternatives to antibiotics and meat;
Health systems strengthening, changing prescription and pharmacy practices, and tackling substandard and falsified medicines;
Practicable context-sensitive incentives, and sustainable finance;
Mapping the global patterns and drivers of AMR, and its health and economic costs;
Continued strong focus on tackling infectious diseases;
Achieving access everywhere to sanitation and universal health coverage.
Key activities included:
AMR Strategy Group fist meeting agenda pdf
The state of AMR data and innovations in performance tracking:
If we are to reduce the risk of AMR, we need to be smarter in our use of data and evidence. Some of the young Global Health Policy Scholars explored data availability and how to improve use of data to identify research gaps and to guide priorities, and ways to more quickly convert research findings into new tools for tackling AMR.
State of AMR data This combines two state of data reports and was prepared by Farlow, A. Ijeoma Nweje, M., Matika, T., Bashir, H.A., Jalloh, M.B., Joung, S.Y., Worm Hortelano, A., (2021).
This supported work on some new visualization metrics on policy performance, FT AMR tracker, see here and here, led on the Oxford side by Yuzana Khan Zaw and myself and on the Financial Times side by Andrew Jack, as part of the FT Future of antibiotics.
Continuing on the theme of data, In 2021 I wrote the Foreword to the Handbook of Research on Essential Information Approaches To Aiding Global Health in the One Health Context. IGI Global. You can read my Foreword here.
We then ran a series of One Health thematic workshops:
AMR and One Health agenda January 2022
AMR and One Health January 2022 meeting summary
AMR Anthropology, Tracker, Surveillance, AI challenge, September 2021 meeting summary
Then turned to AMR in the community (as a relatively neglected focus):
AMR in the Community concept note March 2022
AMR in the community report 2022
GARDP, RKI, Oxford, Kenya meeting minutes November 2022
Then focused on access to antibiotics and stewardship of antibiotics:
Data Intellingence to support access to antibiotics and good stewardship
Roundtable get-to-know-each-other-better meeting May 2023
Access to antibiotics Farlow June 2024
Given our aim to find solutions for, and and stimulate action on, “Livestock and environmental hazard management”, in 2024, with the generous support of the Ineos Oxford Institute, the British Council, and the Berliner Sparkasse, I set up new activity on Food Systems and AMR:
Springboard agenda 6 July 2024
Food Systems and AMR (more details elsewhere).
Related to this, I became a partner/mentor for a new Kenya-UK-LMIC Partnership on Leveraging Fish Genetics and genomics, led by the University of Eldoret, Kenya and Royal Holloway University of London, UK, and funded by the Academy of Medical Sciences and Grand Challenges Research Fund. See more here.
I co-authored a short Lancet Correspondence related to this: Reza HM, Rono S, Chemoiwa E, Ayua E, Chebichii S, Mkrtchyan H, Eltholth M, Zemanay W, Farlow A, Cole J. Establishing equitable partnerships between the Global North and Global South. Lancet. 2024 Aug.
And in 2025, I will be running a meeting, in coordination with the Oxford AMR Network, in Oxford to support the launch of the Lancet One Health Commission Report.
Future Pandemic Prevention and Response
SARS-CoV-2 is the most disruptive virus the world has faced in a century, in part because of the virus itself but also because of the often inadequate or inappropriate, and sometimes even damaging, responses. It followed a series of recent epidemic wake-up calls that were largely ignored at the global level. Without fundamental change, it will not be the last, nor even the worst. The current heightened attention around the world is an opportunity to fundamentally reboot our preparedness for and responses to pandemic risk, and, indeed to risks to health in general. We visualize three layers:
- The best way to tackle pandemics — involving the least loss of life, economic damage, and global hardship — is to stop them before they begin. This requires reshaping the human relationship with nature to reduce the risks of animal-to-human spillover events in the first instant, stronger global surveillance (viruses and the species carrying them, populations at risk, waste-water analysis, etc.), early warning systems, and immediate action on pandemic threats;
- If, nevertheless, outbreaks start, the next step is quick interruption of chains of infection, and the ramping up of global prevention and treatment capacity. This necessitates better grasp of the true underlying situation — epidemiology, virology, testing, and comparable data across countries to guide responses — and stronger health systems, including for some of the poorest populations on the planet.
- If the above responses fail and a virulent virus is highly transmissible, we need an ongoing mechanism to support the research, development, and manufacture of always-close-to-ready vaccines, medicines, and diagnostic tools, and their rapid and equitable global deployment.
We also recognise that this must not come at the cost of other ongoing health initiatives, and that the above needs to be part of efforts to boost health systems and to achieve improved human health especially for the bottom several billion people living on the planet. We must avoid the risk of a global response mechanism that is primarily for the benefit of the rich.
Our day-conference (24th October 2019) on “Healthy Planet Healthy People” just weeks ahead of the pandemic taking off had several sections identifying the risks including Section 2 on “One Health, human-animal interactions, infectious disease emergence, spatial modeling, and pandemic preparedness”.
This was followed by other reports:
Since vaccine inequity was a big focus of global discussions, and because we had a group of great colleagues working on an overlapping AI-for-health global challenge, we ran a body of work on vaccine access:
Digital Health and AI for Health
Digital health and AI tools have been proliferating globally, including in bioinformatics, telehealth, telemedicine, lifestyle and fitness apps, screening, diagnosis, biomarkers, omics, therapeutic selection, disease management (including remotely), medical image analysis and motion recognition, surgery, pathology, tumor and organ analysis, pandemic prediction, blockchain data/records management, trials and medicine discovery. Such tools are fast evolving, with huge transformative potential for health and medicine, but also pose many challenges:
- Efficacy and equity — it is not always clear what works, in what settings, and who benefits.
- Ethics and trust — patients and their data can be misused, leading to discrimination and exclusion.
- Traditional approaches to demonstrating value, and modes of reimbursement, pricing, and financing are all significant barriers to implementation, and are in need of pragmatic innovation and guidelines. There are multiple potential needs for cost effectiveness methodologies and other forms of evaluation to improve decision-making.
- Regulation — regulators are in constant catch-up in a fast-evolving space;
- Health systems — new tools can help, but might also waste resources, and integration into health and care systems is important but challenging.
- Users/patients — tools require training, realistic expectations, willingness to adopt by end-users and willingness to support by healthcare managers, which all need to be based on local knowledge that goes beyond the clinical and economic aspects.
- Europe-wide and global data platforms — there are great opportunities for integrating and interrogating data at scale linked to health problems and clinical practice.
- A particular focus will be on the needs of the bottom two billion people on the planet, and vulnerable and elderly populations everywhere.
This activity generated a range of outcomes:
Digital and AI kick-off agenda
In late 2021 we moved the AI-for-health activity into the ITU-WHO Focus Group AI for Health, and set up a new Working Group for Collaborations and Outreach of which I was made Chair. To support management of this, I partnered with the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich Hertz Institute, HHI.
We ran several meetings on AI innovation focusing on Africa and Asia:
In late 2022 in Cameroon, we proved that we could fill a workshop, ‘AI and Digital Innovation for Health and Human Development in Africa: From Ideas to Impact’ (online here) in one country in Africa relying on amazing people from mostly just that country, including its diaspora working with local implementers innovating context-relevant projects deploying AI for health in local communities.
The ITU-WHO Focus Group is currently transitioning into the new Global Initiative for AI in health (see here, and here). The ITU-WHO Focus Group will contribute its benchmarking and open-source tools, and – it is proposed – the Working Group for Collaborations and Outreach will contribute networks and collaborations and boost rigorous academic research and impact.
The last meeting of the Focus Group that I joined live was in Geneva in July 2023. The agenda and list of speakers is here and the recording of the meeting is here. My focus, as much as I am able, will be to help the global initiative focus on serving local innovators and be led from the ground up.
As I noted in my talk at the WHS in October 2024, the nature of AI innovation in health works differently from innovation of other health interventions like drugs and vaccines. This also needs to be reflected in our approach to setting up digital health and AI for health challenges that factor in global public health impact, affordability, implementability, and equitable access. All this thinking generated an AI innovation paper in PLOS Global Public Health, which became also part of the focus of the WHO/ITU Focus Group for AI for health here, and the notion of an ‘innovation factory’ as part of the Global Initiative: Farlow, A.W.K, Hoffmann, A., Tadesse, G.A., Mzurikwao, D., Beyer, R., Akogo, D., Weicken, E., Matika, T., Nweje, M.I., Wamae, W., Arts, S., Wiegand, T., Bennett, C., Farhat, M.R., Gröschel, M.I. (2023). Rethinking global digital health and AI-for-health innovation challenges. PLOS Global Public Health, 3(4), p.e0001844.
I am working especially closely with the Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam (and with colleagues in South Africa) and with PATH’s new Public Health Impact through Artificial Intelligence, PHIXAI (and with colleagues in India). I was invited to join a panel at the Telengana Global AI Summit 2024, Hyderabad, India, in September “Accelerating AI in Public Health: Fostering South-South Collaborations”, as a guest of, and kindly sponsored by, PHIXAI.
I am working with colleagues in LMICs on the creation of an economic assessment methodology and set of tools so that digital health innovations can be evaluated for their local, context-sensitive, cost effectiveness as well as for their ability to be integrated into health systems. We are exploring the support of Foundations and other funders for this.
In 2024, I set up a one-week Summer school on AI for health, as part of Oxford Certificate programmes, in the beautiful setting of Worcester College, Oxford, with plans to expand the speakers and case studies, and achieve 50% of all places being free to LMIC attendees. We are keen to find sources of funds for this.
As part of my engagement with the Coalition for Equitable Research in Low-Resource Settings (CERCLE, previously, COVID-19 Clinical Research Coalition) I am helping to create a new AI and digital group.
I am working with colleagues to incorporate some new content on AI for health into the Oxford International Health and Tropical Medicine (IHTM) masters programme and the new Oxford MSc in Health Service Improvement and Evaluation.
Planetary Health
Planet earth is our only home. As Carl Sagan once put it, we live on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam (I often start my lectures on planetary health with the famous ‘Pale Blue Dot‘ photo). An even smaller speck of dust follows us around and is the only part of the cosmos outside of earth that the human species has ever visited. A thin film of air, equivalent in thickness to that of the skin on an apple (another prop, with a bite taken out of it, that I sometimes leave on the podium just before my lecture) protects us from the harshness of the sun’s rays and the perils of space objects. As far as we are aware, we are the only life in the cosmos; there is nobody to come to our rescue if we destroy our planetary home. At the bottom of that thin skin of air is a remarkably rustling and bustling surface, rich in biodiversity, teaming with astonishing lifeforms — plants, bacteria, animals, humans. If we look after and enhance that biodiversity, it will look after and protect us.
To support action in this area, I:
- Set up a Global health Strategy Group to focus on planetary health (including climate change, pollution and health, biodiversity and health, plants and fungi for health).
- When the strategy groups were replaced, set up a new Global Partnership for Biodiversity, Medicine, and Health to give a home specifically for work on biodiversity and health.
- Brought groups together (Kew, Plants for Health, Oxford, FIOCRUZ Brazil, TGHN) to explore the value of plants, fungi, algae.
- Have run numerous themed meetings and workshops.
- Encouraged students via numerous lectures and touring lectures (China, Brazil, Europe, Africa, UK, and online).
- Supported collaborations and new networks.
- Wrote papers and contributed to reports and chapters in books.
I joined in supporting the creation of the Berlin Principles on One Health and others working on the links between ecological integrity, emerging infectious diseases originating from wildlife, and other aspects of human health.
The principles were published as: Gruetzmacher, Kim, William B. Karesh, John H. Amuasi, Adnan Arshad, Andrew Farlow, Sabine Gabrysch, Jens Jetzkowitz et al. “The Berlin principles on one health–Bridging global health and conservation.” Science of the Total Environment 764 (2021): 142919 (and the original 2019 statement is here).
I joined others in exploring planetary health ethics, which generated papers and chapters:
Foster, Alexander, Jennifer Cole, Andrew Farlow, and Ivica Petrikova. “Planetary health ethics: beyond first principles.” Challenges 10, no. 1 (2019): 14.
Which led to an invited chapter: Alexander Foster, Jennifer Cole, Ivica Petrikova, Andrew Farlow, Howard Frumkin, Planetary Health Ethics, Chapter 17, Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves, Eds. Sam Myers and Howard Frumkin, Island Press, 2020.
Content and reviews of the book can be found here: Planetary Health – Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves content and reviews
Farlow, Andrew. “The natural capital approach: opportunities and challenges.” Chapter 4 of Planetary health: human health in an era of global environmental change, Ed. Cole, J. CABI 2019.
COVID-19, wet markets, and planetary health Petrikova, I., Cole, J. & Farlow, A., 1 Jun 2020, In: The Lancet Planetary Health. 4, 6, p. E213-E214.
I presented at the FIOCRUZ, Brazil, International Seminar: “Pandemic of Syndemic: A critical approach to planetary health?” You can watch on YouTube here.
And I also lectured at CIDACS, Brazil (see here).
I lectured on planetary health all over China in the 2-3 years before the pandemic (at about 50 institutes – I will create a separate page about this shortly) including at the Beijing Forum where i was hard-hitting on the need to get rid of coal-based energy in China: Andrew Farlow Beijing Forum 2 November 2019 and Beijing forum EH subforum Environment and Health agenda.
A particular focus in recent years has been on biodiversity and health, especially natural products derived from plants, fungi, algae, insects, and marine organisms. Here is a mix of activity in this area:
Biodiversity Medicine and Health Review 25 February 2022
Biodiversity, medicine, and health workshop May 2022
This is the mission statement of an initiative I set up: Global Partnership for Biodiversity, Medicine and Health mission statement
Here is a fun ‘consumer-friendly talk I have gave on the topic: Biodiversity and Medicine talk.
I took part in the workshop that generated publication of Planetary Health: Scoping the German Research Landscape, Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS), Potsdam.
My keen interest in protecting nature for its health benefits has led to strong relationships with scientists based at Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and other botanic gardens and natural history museums, which has resulted in a body of work:
Howes, Melanie‐Jayne R., Cassandra L. Quave, Jérôme Collemare, Evangelos C. Tatsis, Danielle Twilley, Ermias Lulekal, Andrew Farlow et al. “Molecules from nature: Reconciling biodiversity conservation and global healthcare imperatives for sustainable use of medicinal plants and fungi.” Plants, People, Planet 2, no. 5 (2020): 463-481.
– Antonelli, A., Fry, C., Smith, R.J., Simmonds, M.S.J., Kersey, P.J., Pritchard, H.W.*, Abbo, M.S., Acedo, C., Adams, J., Ainsworth, A.M., Allkin, B., Annecke, W., Bachman, S.P., Bacon, K., Bárrios, S., Barstow, C., Battison, A., Bell, E., Bensusan, K., Bidartondo, M.I., Blackhall-Miles, R.J., Borrell, J.S., Brearley, F.Q., Breman, E., Brewer, R.F.A., Brodie, J., Cámara-Leret, R., Campostrini Forza, R., Cannon, P., Carine, M., Carretero, J., Cavagnaro, T.R., Cazar, M.-E., Chapman, T., Cheek, M., Clubbe, C., Cockel, C., Collemare, J. Cooper, A., Copeland, A.I., Corcoran, M., Couch, C., Cowell, C., Crous, P., da Silva, M., Dalle, G., Das, D., David, J.C., Davies, L., Davies, N., De Canha, M.N., de Lirio, E.J., Demissew, S., Diazgranados, M., Dickie, J., Dines, T., Douglas, B., Dröge, G., Dulloo, M.E., Fang, R., Farlow, A., et al. (2020) State of the World’s Plants and Fungi 2020. Royal Botanic Kew Gardens.
I brought together FIOCRUZ, Brazil, The Global Health Network, and Oxford to support the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, England in its (successful) application to the Wellcome Trust for a Kew’s new Plants for Health initiative.
I am preparing the introductory chapter of the Royal Society of Chemistry Book “Natural Products for Disease Chemoprevention”, part of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Drug Discovery book series.
I supported colleagues in the launch of a ‘Climate and health’ component as part of the next wave of the CANDOUR study.
I, 2024, I led an Oxford-wide effort to create a potential application on Climate Change and Health, with no less than 50 colleagues from all across Oxford willing to be co-PIs.
Oxford has recently joined the Planetary Health Alliance, and I regularly engage with the Planetary Health Eastern Africa Hub, the LSHTM Centre on Climate Change and Planetary Health, and the new Centre for Planetary Health Policy, Berlin.
Working together to protect the planet and the health of life on the planet needs strong, equitable, and courageous partnerships. In particular, it also means listening to young people. Therefore, I am working with colleagues on syllabi development for undergraduate and graduate courses in planetary health (engaging with the strong planetary health groups in Germany, Africa, Brazil, and SE Asia) so that our endeavours might have lasting impacts and benefit fellow human beings long after we are gone!
Most of the above is pro bono (though my efforts frequently seem to generate, or support generation of, funds for others) and in need of financial sustainability and a supportive institutional home. If you are interested to support any of the above, financially or institutionally, please get in contact.