Establishing Infrastructure Hubs to Power Evidence Synthesis in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Funding initiative to establish new global infrastructure hubs to enable AI-enabled evidence synthesis to address policy-scale challenges in global health.

Founded in 1936, the Wellcome is an independent foundation that seeks to improve health by supporting researchers, addressing big health challenges, campaigning for better science and encouraging everyone to get involved with science and health research.

Wellcome has created the funding initiative Establishing Infrastructure Hubs to Power Evidence Synthesis in Low- and Middle-Income Countries with the aim to establish five new global infrastructure hubs. The goal is to enable more timely, relevant and affordable AI-enabled evidence synthesis to address policy-scale challenges in global health. The initiative is part of Wellcome’s Evidence Synthesis Infrastructure Collaborative (ESIC) investments.

Funding is provided for the development of global evidence infrastructure hubs which are able to establish foundational living evidence synthesis capabilities in key sectors in order to support health research and health policy. The focus is particularly on health research and policy that is related to challenges in at least one of the following four areas:

• Climate and Health
• Infectious Disease
• Mental Health
• Discovery Research

In addition to these broad areas, projects must also be aligned with the following five policy sectors which match one or more of the pillars of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and provide the organising framework used by ESIC’s partner, the Global SDG Synthesis Coalition. The five policy sectors are:

• Food systems
• Humanitarian assistance
• Economic growth
• Peace and effective institutions
• Social protection 

Projects may create a new global evidence infrastructure hub or build on an existing hub.

To be considered for funding, the research must connect to the development and maintenance of sector-specific living evidence synthesis (LES) infrastructure. It must also make contributions to developing cross-sectoral standards for policy-scale AI-enabled LES and develop any required sector-specific variants, and addressing local, regional or global crises. The project must include a diverse set of interest holders that contribute to co-production, testing and piloting of the evidence synthesis infrastructure and must include steps to actively employ the ESIC collective impact approach.