Dear Readers,

What you see is a brand new website – fast, more relevant, and developing. Our ‘Web 4 Development’ team in Belo Horizonte in Brazil and our communicator in Geneva take all credit for producing this excellent new facility of communication between COHRED and you. This web is ‘work in progress’, and we are bringing progressively more innovations into making it the heart of our global interactions.

Today, I want to draw your attention especially to the ‘Call to Action‘ – in the lower left corner of COHRED’s Home Page. Go there and read it, you will find it interesting. With this effort, we want to emphasize again that ‘in fighting the crocodiles we should not forget that we are actually there to drain the swamp”. While GAVI is doing great work – saving 5.4 million lives in its first ten years of international collaboration – its work has resulted in more vaccinated children, but not in more vaccine R&D, production or regulatory capacities in Africa.

We hope that the Pledging Conference to provide funds to GAVI – which will be held on London on Monday 13th June – will not only result in targets set in terms of vaccinations done or lives saved – no matter how important this is. We also want to urge that goals be set for vaccine-related capacity transfer to Africa. For example – in the next 5 years, the number of vaccine producers in Africa that is ‘WHO pre-qualified’ should increase from 1 to 5. Or, three of all the vaccines purchased with GAVI support should sourced from Africa over the next 5 years.

In this way – research and innovation become key driver of health, equity and development.

We look forward to hearing from you – and hope you will get inspired by us, and get us inspired by you !