Dear HIFA colleagues,
I was sad to learn today by email an announcement from the Communication Initiative: 'Like many of you, The Communication Initiative (The CI) and its partners have been badly impacted by the dismantling of USAID and the stop work orders on essential humanitarian programmes around the world. Sadly, on March 15 2025, we will be forced to cease operations.' There is as yet no formal announcement on the Communication Initiative website www.comminit.com
Launched in 2006 (in the same year as HIFA) the Communication Initiative (CI) has been the world's most important network on knowledge for development, including social and behaviour change for health. Under Executive Director Warren Feek's leadership CI grew to be an invaluable database of resources supporting multiple communities of practice. As we reported on HIFA, Warren sadly died in October 2024 aged 71 from a major stroke. The CI website was visited by more than a million people each year and hosted 38,000 knowledge summaries, with offices in the USA, Canada, South Africa and Colombia.
CI is/was several orders of magnitude larger than HIFA and much better supported financially. This news is a reminder of how *fragile* we all are as organisations working to improve global health.
Best wishes, Neil
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org