Welcome to the 2021 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Virtual Learning Forum “Prepared to Respond: COVID-19 Lessons for the Next Health Emergency” (P2RF)

The COVID-19 pandemic has touched countless human lives, bringing grief, pain and uncertainty to millions of people across the globe. The rapid propagation of the virus has strained health systems across the globe, disrupting routine health care, economic activity and social interactions. The world now faces a critical opportunity to transform these hard-won lessons into concrete actions to build more effective, equitable and resilient health systems that are prepared to respond to future emergencies, whether these are disease outbreaks, natural disasters or humanitarian emergencies.

The Prepared to Respond Learning Forum (P2RF) aims at capturing the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic by providing a space for experts, decision-makers and practitioners to share how they have responded to this unprecedented challenge, what measures, actions and innovative approaches they have applied to protect and save lives, investigate what has worked well and why, and enable countries to learn from each other so they can prepare and respond more effectively to the next emergency.