The Global Ministerial Forum on Research for Health is meeting in Bamako, Mali from November 17-19, 2008. This Ministerial is organized by the Council on Health Research for Development (COHRED), Global Forum for Health Research, the Republic of Mali, the United Nations Cultural, Scientific and Educational Organization (UNESCO), the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), and coordinated by the Bamako 2008 Secretariat.
One of the outputs of this Ministerial is the Bamako Call to Action which calls upon WHO, UNESCO and partners to “implement its new Research for Health Strategy as a means of harnessing research for health improvement, re?ecting both the [WHO Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property Global Strategy and Plan of Action] GSPA and the work of the high level Task Force on scaling-up research to strengthen health systems”. It is understood that the Bamako Call to Action will be transmitted to the WHO Executive Board for its consideration as well as UNESCO.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the WHO Research Strategy emanated from a request by the 120th Session of the Executive Board in January requesting the Director-General
to submit to the Sixty-second World Health Assembly a strategy for the management and organization of research activities within WHO.
The WHO Research Strategy has not been approved yet; it will be submitted to the WHO Executive Board in January 2009. If accepted, it will be transmitted to the World Health Assembly (May 2009). During the discussions of the Bamako Call to Action, and in a workshop on the WHO strategy on research for health and the WHO IGWG Global Strategy and Plan of Action, Sally Davies (Director-General, Research and Development, Health Department, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) twice intimated that it was the view of her Government that the IGWG Global Strategy and Plan of Action be subsumed under the WHO research agenda. The fact that a government representative has suggested that an inter-governmental process bearing the consensus imprimatur of 193 WHO Member States (the IGWG global strategy) play second fiddle to a strategy not even adopted by WHO strikes your blogger as problematic. The January 2009 Executive Board could constitute a flash point between the WHO Global Strategy and Plan of Action on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property and the inchoate WHO strategy on research for health.