The ongoing coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic is posing unprecedented challenges to leadership across the world. The pace at which policymakers, practitioners and researchers react to this emerging and complex crisis will make a profound difference to people’s lives and livelihoods. But how can we ensure effective, collective decision-making based on emerging evidence, changing trends and shifting scientific understanding, all in the face of considerable uncertainty?

Recent experience highlights the need for adaptive leadership in national and global responses to the outbreak. This requires adaptive leadership capacities like being open and transparent about learning, using collective decision-making processes and building trust with communities and individuals.

Using ODI’s research on adaptive leadership during the coronavirus response, we discuss practical applications of adaptive responses during the Covid-19 outbreak, bridging science, policy and practice.

Twenty-five years after the world's leaders committed to transforming women's rights in the Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA), girls still remain a missing piece of the roadmap towards gender equality. While tremendous progress has been made, there is still a long way to go and it is more important than ever to make sure girls are not left behind. 

We know that during a girl’s lifecycle the years between ages 10 and 19 are increasingly recognised as the critical time to protect and promote their rights. In order to prevent girls from the double burden society places on them for being young and female, their contexts and contributions must be counted. Successful social and political transformation requires better data on girls' experiences, adequate planning, multi-stakeholder engagement and funding to drive norm change and build a world that girls deserve. 

This event brings together leading voices in shaping the global political agenda for girls’ rights and shares innovations and initiatives that put them front and centre of current and future planning.

The urgency of the Covid-19 threat is increasing the demand for governments to use existing technologies in new ways and to use untested new technologies on urgent problems. The use of these technologies are part of a rapidly deployed ‘digital safety net’ aimed at saving lives and protecting citizens. Without the usual time available to test new ideas it is more important than ever that best practice is identified and shared.

This event contributes to further thinking about the role of digital technology in providing a safety net in times of crisis, the essential components of the safety net and newly designed technology being used to respond to the Covid-19 crisis.

We bring perspectives from different geographies and address critical lessons covering three aspects of the crisis response: tackling the virus, social protection and public information.

Ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being at all ages is essential to sustainable development. As the Covid-19 crisis illustrates all too vividly, not only is health important in itself, but healthy people are better able to learn, be productive and contribute to their communities. Achieving universal health coverage (UHC) is critical to this and essential to ensuring that no one is ‘left behind’ in accessing quality health services because of who they are, where they live or their socio-economic situation.

Using ODI research on access to health for left-behind groups and contemporary case studies on moves towards UHC in low- and middle-income countries, we discuss the constraints, enabling factors and strategies used in the roll-out of UHC, as well innovative approaches and interventions to reach left-behind groups and achieve UHC in a progressively universal manner. We will also incorporate reflections on how the current Covid-19 outbreak is highlighting the need for universality, and how it might help or hinder progress towards UHC.

Stories of irrelevant aid regularly arise in humanitarian assistance. People affected by disasters or crises receive food they cannot eat, services they do not want or technologies they cannot use. If they are not getting what they really need, something is going wrong.

Relevance is central to humanitarian principles and standards, however putting it into practice is profoundly difficult and potentially disruptive. Realigning the humanitarian offer with the priorities of affected people opens unique opportunities in identifying dynamic needs, being culturally and contextually relevant and delivering on time and at scale.

On the back of ALNAP’s 32nd Annual Meeting, we explore how those working in humanitarian policy and implementation are tackling these themes and the challenges faced in doing so.

The world’s second largest outbreak of Ebola was declared on 1 August 2018 in the Democratic Republic of Congo. More than 2,200 people have died and over 3,300 have been infected. The response to Ebola has been complicated by conflict between central government, local political actors and armed groups in the affected areas. Rumours about the virus and the response have also been spread and shaped by that conflict.

Attempts have been made to apply key lessons from the 2014-15 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, such as the need for strong surveillance and outbreak control strategies and the importance of understanding the behaviours, practices and perceptions of communities and of engaging them actively in the response. The identification and trial use of effective vaccines during the outbreak has been an important and promising development. Yet, despite these efforts, cases of Ebola continue to be reported.

Drawing on articles from the Humanitarian Exchange, this webinar will discuss to what degree the lessons learned from the West Africa Ebola outbreak have been taken into account in the DRC response and how barriers to containment of the disease could be better addressed.

PFI conference 2020: closing panel by ODI Global

Chair: Cathal Long, Research Fellow ODI

• Binta Zahra Diop, PhD. Candidate, University of Oxford

• Khuram Farooq, Chair of IFMIS Community of Practice, World Bank

• Jess Gartner, CEO & Founder at Allovue

• Jacqueline Musabende, Assistant Professor, Mount Royal University

Chair: Alina Rocha Menocal, Senior Research Fellow ODI

• Joe Abah, Country Director DAI, Nigeria and formerly head of public sector reform,

Government of Nigeria

• Kalipso Chalkidou, Director of Global Health Policy, Centre for Global Development

• Adnan Khan, Professor of Practice, London School of Economics

• Jodi Wishnia, University of Witswaterand and Public Health Consultant

Session 4: Promoting accountability for results

Chair: Tom Hart, Research Fellow, ODI

• Seye Abimbola, Lecturer, Public Health, University of Sydney

• Ivor Beazley, Senior Public Sector Specialist, World Bank

• Loraine Hawkins, Governor, The Health Foundation

• Dan Honig, Assistant Professor of International Development, John Hopkins

University