Project duration
January 2022
August 2023
The Global Labs project aims to connect students from Geneva and beyond with the International Geneva ecosystem, to foster innovative policy ideas. Through an exchange with professionals and by co-writing a policy brief, each Global Lab strives to strengthen students’ set of hard skills (e.g. policy writing), soft skills (e.g. public speaking), and personal networks, while providing key multilateral fora with youth’s inputs.
During our second edition (March-May 2022), we focused on communicable diseases and pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response (PPR), which are a major threat to global public health as well as social and economic well-being. To tackle shortcomings of the current international framework to prevent future pandemics and ensure a more effective international response to them when they occur, two sets of international regulations are currently being discussed. Amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR), as well as the negotiations of a new instrument, a broader “Pandemic Treaty”, are expected to be agreed upon by May 2024. Their success (or failure) will be key in shaping how the global health system will work in the future.
In this context, foraus brought together students from Geneva with experts from the International Geneva to ideate measures and recommendations needed to answer the following question during a one-day workshop on 24 March: what measures should the international community, and Switzerland in particular, adopt to strengthen prevention of future infectious diseases crises and halt their rise by 2030? The workshop was followed by a 2 month co-writing phase and the second edition of Global lab concluded by the presentation of a jointly written project brief to Swiss authorities and relevant global health stakeholders in Geneva in May 2023.
Interested? Check out our project page on Policy Kitchen!
In 2021, our first edition focused on the topic of noncommunicable diseases and related risk factors such as unhealthy diets, tobacco use, air pollution, or physical inactivity ended in May 2022. After an exchange with professionals from the WHO’s NCD Department, civil society (NCD Alliance), academia (University of Geneva), and the private sector (Price Waterhouse Cooper Switzerland), participants formulated policy recommendations to address NCD risk factors in the future.
The next edition is taking place from March to May 2022. We are currently working on the project design. Stay tuned!
Methodology: For this project, we used visioning, a participatory foresight methodology as well as a dedicated platform on our policy innovation tool Policy Kitchen to crowdsource participants’ ideas.
