On 17 November, the United Nations released the UN Research Roadmap on the COVID-19 Recovery, which seeks to leverage the power of science to support recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and promote a more equitable and sustainable future.
Professor Glenda Gray, President and CEO of the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) was a member of the Report’s Steering Group on Health Systems and Services which she Co-Chaired alongside Professor Sir Jeremy Farrar from Wellcome. The Report, conducted on an invitation of the United Nations (UN) Deputy Secretary General, Amina Mohammed, involved engaging 38 research funding organizations and consulting with more than 250 experts.
The COVID-19 crisis has exposed stark global inequities, fragilities and unsustainable practices that pre-date this pandemic and have intensified its impact. Recovering better from COVID-19 will depend on bold efforts to strengthen health systems, shore up social protections, protect economic opportunities, bolster multilateral collaboration, and enhance social cohesion. In light of the scale of action needed, the socio-economic recovery from COVID-19 also provides a historic opportunity to reimagine societies using a human rights lens and initiate the transformative changes needed to achieve the better and brighter future envisioned in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Science represents the world’s best chance for recovering better from the COVID-19 crisis. As societies face the difficult task of implementing recovery strategies with limited time and resources, they have a choice between business as usual and transformative changes. Transformation offers better prospects, but it will require ingenuity and research from the full range of disciplines.
Ina nutshell, the Roadmap has been described as a commitment and a guide to make use of research to determine how COVID-19 socio-economic recovery efforts that can be purposefully designed to stimulate equity, resilience, sustainability and progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It also outlines a set of 25 research priorities – five priorities for each of the five pillars of the UN’s socio-economic recovery framework – as well as numerous sub-priorities providing more comprehensive elaboration. Together, the priorities emphasize the need for research to advance gender equity, engage marginalized populations, ensure decent work, prevent a digital divide, tackle “One Health” intersectoral challenges, and inform global governance reforms.
According to Prof Gray, more critically, the Roadmap identifies research priorities and scientific strategies to support a recovery that benefits everyone as well as actions that researchers, research funding agencies, governments, civil society organizations and UN entities can implement.
“The Roadmap reinforces the role of science in curbing the pandemic and supporting recovery efforts. Just like in putting up measures to curb the spread of the virus, evidence-based decision-making and the role of science should remain an underpinning cornerstone for recovery efforts,” said Prof Gray.
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