In pursuit of equitable access, the OpenWHO team of the Learning and Capacity Development Unit has worked across the three levels of the Organization, and in particular together with WHO country and regional offices, to translate WHO’s evidence-based guidance into learning in the languages of Member States. Volunteer translators, public health institutes, Translators Without Borders and professional translation companies have been contributing to the translation work.
OpenWHO has translated COVID-19 online courses into as many languages as possible, nearing 60 languages on the platform, as WHO strives to ensure equitable access. Priority has been given to languages spoken by vulnerable or underserved populations in low- and middle-income countries as learning available in preferred languages enhances uptake and comprehension. These 56 languages available on OpenWHO include the official languages of every WHO region, the 15 most commonly spoken languages worldwide and the official languages of 43 out of 46 of the least-developed countries.
A total of 10.5 million words have been translated thus far and on average, each of OpenWHO’s COVID-19 courses has been translated into 4.8 languages. The two courses available in the most languages are the Introduction to COVID-19 course available in 44 languages and the Infection Prevention and Control course in 24 languages.
Multilingualism in OpenWHO's large-scale online production strategy has already resulted in 5.7 million course enrolments driven largely by 38 COVID-19 courses. The top 10 languages by enrolment are English (76.2%), Spanish (13.0%), French (3.1%), Arabic (1.5%), Portuguese (1.5%), Indian sign language (1.0%), Hindi (0.7%), Indonesian (0.6%), Russian (0.5%) and Italian (0.4%).