Leadership and Governance

Formalised at the end of 2017 under the leadership of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme (WHE), the EIOS initiative is the culmination of a joint commitment by the Global Health Security Initiative (GHSI), the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (JRC) and WHO to enhance capacity to assess epidemic threats to global health security (refer to the Ministerial Statements of the Seventeenth Ministerial Meeting of the Global Health Security Initiative, 24 February 2017 – Brussels, Belgium). The EIOS Core Team (ECT) was subsequently set up within WHE to lead EIOS and is tasked with further developing and expanding the initiative and its related aspects, including its community, technology and governance.

Since January 2022, the ECT is hosted within the Intelligence Innovation and Integration (III) unit of the new WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, a sepcialized department of the WHE. The Hub in Berlin is responsible for building a system of collaborative intelligence enabling better decisions to avert and manage public health threats and risks. Its goal is to enable, strengthen and support countries, regional and global actors in averting and managing public health threats and risks through collaborative problem solving and decision-making for short-term action and long-term policies, informed by better data and analytics. EIOS is one of the new Hub’s flagship initiatives and one of its main vehicles for building a strong PHI community of practice, as well as a multidisciplinary network to support it, as a part of its mission.  

As a global collaboration, the EIOS initiative is governed by a 15-member Coordination Group (CG) with representatives from various organisations. The CG meets quarterly to discuss and advise on developments and priorities for the initiative and system.

While the ECT is a small team located at the WHO Hub in Berlin, Germany, it is supported by a team of professionals at all six WHO regional offices. Together with EIOS focal points at collaborating organisations and networks, they form the wider Global EIOS Support Team (GEST), making EIOS a truly global collaboration led by WHO.