The Global Health Centre is exploring critical dimensions of the global effort to eradicate polio, including how European countries are overcoming the final barriers to disease eradication and ensuring lasting legacies for health systems. Polio eradication would be a momentous achievement. To date, global initiatives for the treatment and prevention of polio have prevented hundreds of thousands of cases of permanent paralysis, especially among children, and greatly reduced mortality. With sustained efforts to reduce the global burden of disease, it may be possible to eradicate polio. Indeed, polio could become the second disease eradicated after smallpox. However, there remain significant barriers to eradication, including effectively leveraging existing capacity, and guaranteeing ongoing funding commitments.

This project aims to support the legacy of the polio eradication campaign, post-GPEI, through evaluating how the past accomplishments of this programme can be leveraged to achieve the SDGs. Over the past five years, GHC has conducted policy dialogues with European actors to explore various perspectives on addressing the social and political barriers to polio eradication, and the challenges to polio transition planning. Currently, the team is extending insights from policy dialogues through ongoing research on the global health financing commitments of select European countries post-eradication, and the legacies of other disease eradication campaigns.

Global health financing post-eradication with a focus on WHO

Through in-depth interviews with key representatives from donor countries and analysis of global health budgets, this research explores commitments of select European governments to global health financing, as part of the MDG-to-SDG shift from disease-specific programmes to health systems strengthening, and specifically post-GPEI. With approximately 20 to 30% of WHO’s budget dependent on the GPEI, the end of polio eradication efforts is assumed to have far-reaching implications. Understanding decisions of key donors is, therefore, important to assess the potential financing ramifications of the GPEI’s transition.