Your Excellency Olivier Véran,
Dear colleagues and friends,
Bonjour à tous, good afternoon.
As you know, today is a great day for WHO, with the groundbreaking ceremony for the WHO Academy.
But we also like to think it’s a great day for Lyon and France, because it makes this great city and this great nation the platform from which we hope to have a huge global impact.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a powerful reminder of how critical health workers are, and why they need investment, decent jobs, and the most up-to-date information, competencies and tools to keep their communities healthy and safe.
That’s what the WHO Academy is all about. It will be a school for the future, and a school for the world.
Our ambitions are to transform lifelong learning for health impact globally.
WHO is known for producing world-class technical guidance, across a huge range of health issues.
But too often, that guidance does not deliver the impact it should in countries.
Too often, it sits on a shelf or in an overworked health administrator’s inbox, and isn’t fully implemented.
We need to find ways of making sure WHO guidance is applied faster and delivers results faster.
Using state-of-the-art learning technologies and advancements in learning science, the Academy will expand worldwide access to the highest quality learning.
It will deliver multilingual, personalised learning programmes in digital, in-person and blended formats – anywhere in the world. And it will go beyond the transfer of knowledge, to building the competencies of millions of people, including health workers, managers, educators, ministries of health and the general public.
The Academy will include a high-tech simulation facility, unlike any in the world, which will use virtual and augmented reality simulate disaster response and other health emergencies, in realistic field conditions.
It will also be a centre of learning and career development for WHO’s own workforce.
The Lyon campus – to be completed in 2023 – will reflect WHO’s values and ambitions: it will be an innovative, accessible, eco-friendly, collaborative and interactive facility in the heart of Lyon’s bio-medical district.
So once again, my thanks to President Macron, Minister Véran, and also to the city and metropole of Lyon and the regional council, for their support in bringing us to this point.
We look forward to a very constructive relationship that has benefits for Lyon and France, and benefits for the whole world.
I thank you. Merci beaucoup.