During my time as Minister of Health in Ethiopia, we wanted to transform the country’s health system, and I was looking for guidance on how to do it. It turned out the World Health Organization (WHO) had exactly what I was looking for – but it wasn’t WHO that told me about it; I only found it by googling.
My experience is not unique. WHO is known for its world-class technical products – guidelines, norms and standards – but translating them into real-world action has often been hindered by a lack of institutionalized training. Our products sometimes sit unused on shelves or unopened in email inboxes. While WHO does provide training in countries, it has never before been institutionalized or provided at the scale needed.
That was one of the reasons that, following my election as Director-General of WHO in 2017, we set about the most ambitious set of reforms in the organization’s history, to make WHO more effective, efficient and responsive to the needs and challenges that countries face.
One of those needs is for capacity building to meet evolving health threats, including the threat of epidemics and pandemics. We recognized that while WHO has rich knowledge and expertise, we had no systematic or institutionalized way of sharing it.
So the idea for the WHO Academy was born: a new institution to equip health and care workers, policymakers and the WHO workforce with the skills and competencies they need to deliver health for all.
During the G20 meeting in Argentina in 2018, I had a chance meeting in a corridor with President Emmanuel Macron of France, and mentioned to him our idea for the WHO Academy. He grasped the concept immediately, and invited me to the Elysée to discuss it with him in more detail. In 2019 we signed a letter of intent to establish the Academy in Lyon; in 2021 we broke ground, and today we will open its doors together.
With the generous support of the Government of France, the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, Lyon City and Métropole, the Academy features a state-of-the-art learning campus for both in-person and remote training; and an intelligent online learning platform, using artificial intelligence and other technologies to deliver free access to world-class courses on priority health topics.
