About

About the P2RF

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Emergency Response team has supported partners across the globe for many years in dealing with a range of devastating emergencies, including the West Africa Ebola outbreak in 2013, floods and landslides in Kashmir and Nepal, Cyclone Idai in Mozambique, and - more recently - the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2019, the Foundation held its first edition of the P2RF in Seattle, bringing together PHEOC leaders from the Global South. In 2021, given the global and complex nature of the COVID-19 crisis and the urgency of capturing critical lessons for improved preparedness and response to future emergencies, we decided to take the P2RF online, enabling exchanges across more geographies and a vaster set of expertise areas.

Given many participants’ direct involvement in the COVID-19 response across the world which required their immediate and continuous involvement, the P2RF ran as a series of 1-day seminars in September, October, November, and December 2021, providing maximum flexibility for learning and exchanges.

Over the course of the seminars, experts, leaders, managers and practitioners from the public health, humanitarian and environmental sector addressed the key lessons learnt from the pandemic, touching upon subjects such as private sector collaboration, risk communication and community engagement, vaccine equity and delivery, the One Health approach, multisectoral and multi-stakeholder coordination, and financing for pandemic preparedness.

The ongoing COVID-19 emergency coupled with recurring disease outbreaks, a worsening climate, more violent and frequent natural disasters as well as increasing humanitarian crisis are showing us that the need to be prepared to respond persists and remains relevant. P2RF will therefore continue its series of events beyond 2021 with more information to follow in the coming months.