Sri Lanka’s Health Proposal Gains $17 Million Funding

COLOMBO (News 1st); A proposal by Sri Lanka has been selected for a USD 17 Million Grant, said the World Health Organization.

Sri Lanka's comprehensive proposal, ‘One Vision, One Shield: Sri Lanka's Integrated One Health Pandemic Preparedness & Response,’ has been awarded a $17 million grant in the Pandemic Fund’s second round of funding allocations. 

This proposal was developed with the support of five key implementing agencies: the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the World Bank (WB), the World Health Organization (WHO), and UNICEF, in collaboration with One Health stakeholders in Sri Lanka.

The grant will be distributed over a three-year period starting in January 2025.

It aims to implement the recommendations from Sri Lanka's most recent Joint External Evaluation and the subsequent National Action Plan for Health Security. The focus areas include enhancing surveillance, laboratory capacities, and the health workforce.

In addition to this grant, Sri Lanka is also a beneficiary of a multi-country proposal submitted for the WHO South-East Asia region. 

The second round of the Pandemic Fund grant allocations, announced on October 18, 2024, aims to bolster pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response capacities in 40 countries across six geographical regions.

To date, the two rounds of funding total $885 million, mobilizing an additional $6 billion in support of 75 countries, half of which are low- and middle-income countries.

The Pandemic Fund provides a dedicated stream of additional, long-term financing to strengthen critical pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response (PPR) capabilities in low- and middle-income countries through investments and technical support at the national, regional, and global levels. 

The Pandemic Fund aligns with the Health Emergency Prevention, Preparedness, Response and Resilience (HEPR) framework of the World Health Organization under the financing arm, providing catalytic financing to transform national HEPR capacities. 

These investments, which target gaps in surveillance, laboratory capacity, risk communication, zoonotic diseases, risk management and more, will help avert the much larger costs that the world would incur in a future pandemic.