As the WHO Foundation’s Inaugural Global Health Ambassador, it was a meaningful afternoon to share the Wellbeing Foundation Africa’s frontline learnings at the roundtable on From Early Warning to Anticipatory Action: Advancing Proactive Emergency Preparedness at Goals House in Geneva, co-hosted by Dr. Marie Roseline Belizaire, Regional Emergency Director at WHO Africa, and Valerie Boulet, Chief Development Officer at the WHO Foundation, with fellow colleagues from Colgate-Palmolive, Google Health, Microsoft, among others, as part of the Health Emergencies Alliance convening programme on the sidelines of the WHO 79th World Health Assembly.

Africa has every capacity to move from response to preparedness, and the infrastructure investment of the past decade has built the foundations to make that possible. The opportunity now is in the translation layer, connecting the signal to the decision with the speed and coherence that communities on the frontline deserve. Our WBFA health workers are often the first to observe a pattern forming, and the real breakthrough comes when that observation moves upward into a coordinated response in real time. That requires sustained partnership, community trust, political will, and pre-positioned resources. Those are the conditions that make the technology work, and that make platforms like the Preparedness Data Exchange PDX, developed by Dr. Dick Chamla and the Nairobi Emergency Hub team, such an important step forward for the continent.

In 2025 and 2026, the Health Emergencies Alliance has focused specifically on leveraging AI and data to monitor potential health emergencies, and this discussion on what it will genuinely take to move proven preparedness solutions from ambition to scale was exactly the quality of conversation this moment demands, marking what I hope will be the first of many as Goals House at WHA79 inaugurates this convening platform at the World Health Assembly.

 

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