The WHO Academy: Building a lifelong learning platform

WHO’s technical products such as recommendations, guidance, reports and data are widely used by the global health community in everything from medical textbooks to scientific articles, from student essays to feature stories.

With the launch of the WHO Academy in December 2024, this important global source of knowledge and expertise will be taken to the next level as an invaluable resource for health and care workers, teachers, students, policy makers and the public. Dr David Atchoarena, Executive Director of the WHO Academy, outlines the progress that has been made with the project, the challenges along the way and what is still required to create the state-of-the art digital learning hub that will meet the world’s needs. 

“The WHO Academy was initiated by the Director-General as part of the Transformation Agenda,” says Dr Atchoarena. “The Transformation aimed to make WHO stronger, more effective and faster in responding to the needs of Member States. Within that vision, learning was an important component; how to promote WHO as a learning organization, but also how to promote lifelong learning in the health sector.”

Training has always been an integral part of WHO’s mandate, helping countries to translate WHO’s guidelines into policy and improvements to health systems and healthcare delivery. Taking that role one step further, the WHO Academy emerged in 2019 as one of the main initiatives of the WHO transformation, supported by national and local governments of France as the host country for the facility in Lyon. The vision of the project is to empower health and care workers, policy-makers, and the WHO workforce to acquire the skills and competencies they need to realize the highest possible level of health for all. It has been built to leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide an engaging, personalized experience for all.

Some significant challenges emerged in the development of the Academy project which defined the resulting learning ecosystem. The need to promote universal access to a substantial global health workforce was paramount. There was a focus on enhancing the quality of the training available in the face of fast-changing needs and an environment where technology and scientific knowledge is rapidly evolving. It was also crucial to ensure the training content was designed to take local contexts into account, ensuring relevance to the cultures, languages and conditions of the health systems. 

To address those challenges, it was decided to make the primary delivery mode online learning and make the platform freely available to all as a global public good. WHO has also been working on modalities to allow offline access to course content for those in rural or remote areas with limited connectivity.

If we want to contribute to enhancing health provision in those areas, which are also often the areas where people have the least access to health services, then we have to come up with additional solutions to cater for those groups,” says Dr Atchoarena.

Select target groups are currently trialling the platform and a first set of around 50 courses are set to be released in 2024. While the Academy is already functional, the team are continuing to improve the platform and seek innovative solutions to ongoing challenges of access, quality, relevance and partnerships. WHO is engaging partners and Member States at the World Health Assembly and other fora in preparation for the official launch of the platform in December 2024.

There are still some hurdles to overcome, but once launched the Academy is set to be an excellent resource for training health professionals, promoting health literacy and building a stronger WHO workforce. Alongside the other transformation initiatives, the Academy will contribute to a more efficient organization, one that can adapt and respond to the fast-changing needs of the environment, health systems and requests from Member States.