"La Caixa" Foundation, Novo Nordisk Fonden, Wellcome Trust and Volkswagen Foundation promote international research projects on mobility and global health
Seven international scientific projects have been selected for the Mobility-Global Medicine and Health Research programme. This programme, promoted in collaboration between the "la Caixa" Foundation, Novo Nordisk Fonden, the Wellcome Trust and the Volkswagen Foundation, aims to study the opportunities, risks and possible solutions to the effects of increasing mobility on global health.
The four foundations have joined forces to promote research into one of the main challenges recently highlighted by the coronavirus pandemic: the impact that the increasing mobility of people, goods and services can have on global health and how the effects of this mobility can be addressed in a sustainable way. To this end, they have awarded grants totalling 10.3 million euros to innovative and interdisciplinary projects.
The call, which is competitive and has been evaluated by international experts, has awarded 1.5 million euros to the project Transforming data collection and surveillance around vaccination (including COVID-19) and key diseases in migrants in the MENA Region, led by Ana Requena-Méndez, Assistant Research Professor at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal).
The project will promote the collection of health data on the migrant population to improve health policies and access to health services for this population in North Africa and the Middle East, a region that has become a global hotspot for migration and which in 2019 welcomed 46 million people who had left their countries of origin behind.
To this end, researchers will create a digital tool that will assess access to and optimise the collection of migrant health data, which can be monitored and shared across regions, with the ultimate goal of improving migrant health and access to health services.
All projects selected in the programme, which have between three and five years to develop, are international partnerships between high-income and low- and middle-income countries, allowing scientists and academics to work together on an equal footing, with all parties benefiting from the joint research work. It also aims to foster research and science education in the territories under study themselves.
Specifically, the ISGlobal project is being carried out in an international consortium with The Blue Nile National Institute for Communicable Diseases of the University of Gezira (Sudan); the Office National de la Famille et de la Population, Tunisia; St George's University of London and the Ecole National Sante Publique and Mohamed V University in Morocco.
In addition to the Spanish project, the programme has also awarded the following projects:
Volkswagen Stiftung (Germany):
1. Multilingualism in providing quality mental health care to migrants – needs, resources and practices (MiM2M), by researcher Mike Mösko (University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf).
2. Mobility Regimes of Pandemic Preparedness and Response (MoREPPaR): The Case of COVID-19, led by Hansjörg Dilger (Free University of Berlin).
3. Mobile Mosquitoes – understanding the entangled mobilities of Aedes mosquitoes and humans in India, Mexico, Tanzania and Germany, by researcher Ulrike Beisel (Free University of Berlin).
Novo Nordisk Fonden (Denmark):
1. Antimicrobial Resistance and Labour Migration across Healthcare Boundaries in Northern South Asia (AMR@LAB), led by Jens Seeberg (Aarhus Universitet).
2. Understanding how mobility affects forcibly displaced persons continuity of chronic disease care (CONTINUITY), led by Morten Skovdal (Københavns Universitet).
Wellcome Trust (United Kingdom):
1. There is no app for this! Regulating the migration of health apps in Sub- Saharan Africa, de Sharifah Sekalala (University of Warwick).