HISP Receives New Grant to Scale DHIS2 for Climate & Health
A three-year, £4 million grant from Wellcome will support HISP’s work with country partners to scale the adoption of DHIS2 climate-health tools for improved health sector planning, preparedness, resilience and response to climate-related threats.
The HISP Centre at the University of Oslo (HISP UiO) has been awarded a three-year, £4 million GBP grant from Wellcome to support the continued development and implementation of DHIS2 for Climate & Health.
This follows the successful conclusion of the first phase of our Climate & Health project, which was also supported by Wellcome. During the two-year, “proof of concept” phase, HISP UiO and the HISP network collaborated with global experts and local stakeholders in 10 countries in Africa and Asia, using an action-research approach to develop innovative new open-source tools for climate-health data integration and predictive modeling of climate-sensitive diseases and to test them in different contexts and geographies based on local priorities.
The grant from Wellcome supports the continuation and scaling of this work. In the coming years, we will continue to develop and improve our suite of global tools, including the DHIS2 Climate App, Climate Tools, Open Climate Service that supports integration and harmonization of global and local climate, environmental, population, and other data sets, and the Chap Modeling Platform and DHIS2 Modeling App that provide powerful, AI-enabled tools for predictive modeling and forecasting.
The ongoing development of these tools will be closely informed by collaboration with the local HISP groups in the HISP network, ensuring that they remain grounded in the needs of country-level stakeholders and support government priorities and national health adaptation plans.
During this phase, HISP groups will also continue to work with their national partners to develop local capacity to use and maintain these tools, enabling full local ownership of DHIS2 Climate & Health platforms and supporting their effective use to plan, prepare, and respond to climate-related health threats.
Professor Kristin Braa, director of the HISP Centre, expressed gratitude to Wellcome for this new grant, and described it as being “critical” for supporting the HISP action-research approach that has driven our success with this project.
“We are very happy to be able to continue the close collaboration across HISP groups that has enabled the co-creation of digital tools that benefit all countries. Wellcome’s support has made it possible for us to bring together teams from 10 countries for weekly meetings—plus the 6 countries that were added through Global Fund catalytic support—where we share knowledge and build global resources together. This is a unique approach, and one that we will expand and build on in the next three years.” – Professor Kristin Braa
The resources and tools developed in the new phase of the Wellcome-supported DHIS2 Climate & Health project will be made publicly and freely available through the DHIS2 website.
