2024 In Review
From bottlenecks to breakthroughs
Dear Colleague,
As we begin 2025, public health faces an all-too-familiar challenge: Life-saving interventions become invisible precisely because they succeed.
Our partners have implemented policies and programs that will save more than 7.5 million lives (and counting)
Since we launched seven years ago, Resolve to Save Lives has accelerated action on the world’s deadliest health threats by innovating solutions, testing them with partners around the world, and working alongside national and global institutions to bring them to scale. Our partners have implemented policies and programs that will save more than 7.5 million lives (and counting) by eliminating toxic trans fats from the food supply for nearly half the world’s population and improving care of more than 30 million people with hypertension. Not one of these 7.5 million people may ever know that they were protected from an early death – and this is how it should be. When public health works best, no one notices.
But …. We think the world should take note of the heroes who save lives every day. That’s why we publish our Epidemics That Didn’t Happen report highlighting inspiring stories of health systems around the world stopping infectious disease outbreaks in their tracks.
Our 7-1-7 target for disease outbreak detection and control has scaled rapidly: it’s been adopted by WHO, the World Bank, and other entities. Most importantly, 28 countries use the target to find threats faster and stop them sooner. The 7-1-7 Alliance facilitates lesson sharing and collaborative learning. And we’re partnering with hundreds of primary health facilities in Ethiopia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Uganda to make sure they’re ready to stop the next epidemic, through our Epidemic-Ready Primary Health Care initiative.
In 2025, I look forward to exploring how reducing lead in our environment can reduce heart disease and protect child health and how we can better prepare for climate-related health emergencies. I also look forward to having the world’s attention on hypertension at this year’s UN General Assembly – an opportunity to improve access to essential generic medicines for hundreds of millions of people with high blood pressure and to focus on increasing the number of patients effectively protected from a heart attack or stroke with safe, effective, inexpensive medications.
We can expect turbulent times in global health, but public health has faced many challenges before. Resolve to Save Lives will continue to advance our vision of a world where people live longer, healthier lives and communities thrive. Thank you for joining us in our resolve to partner with communities and countries to save millions more lives.
All the best,
Dr. Tom Frieden
President and CEO
Resolve to Save Lives
Innovations with global impact
Resolve to Save Lives works with partners to accelerate action against the world’s deadliest health threats. Alongside our partners, we identify health threats that can be stopped, rapidly co-create and test simple solutions, and partner to scale up these solutions in countries and around the world. In our second year as an independent organization, these innovations are already making a global impact.
Making the world safer from epidemics
The COVID-19 pandemic drove home a stark reality: the world urgently needs to find and stop infectious disease outbreaks faster. Developed and refined with our partners Brazil, Ethiopia, Liberia, Nigeria, and Uganda, the 7-1-7 target we proposed in 2021 is the first real-time, start-to-end assessment of how quickly health systems detect and contain epidemic threats. In 2024, global organizations including WHO, the World Bank and the Global Fund increasingly relied on 7-1-7 and, more importantly, more than two dozen hosted by Resolve to Save Lives, have enabled countries all over the world, from Costa Rica to Kenya, to self-train on 7-1-7 to stop deadly outbreaks in their tracks.
Making the world safer from epidemics
The COVID-19 pandemic drove home a stark reality: the world urgently needs to find and stop infectious disease outbreaks faster. Developed and refined with our partners Brazil, Ethiopia, Liberia, Nigeria, and Uganda, the 7-1-7 target we proposed in 2021 is the first real-time, start-to-end assessment of how quickly health systems detect and contain epidemic threats. In 2024, global organizations including WHO, the World Bank and the Global Fund increasingly relied on 7-1-7 and, more importantly, more than two dozen hosted by Resolve to Save Lives, have enabled countries all over the world, from Costa Rica to Kenya, to self-train on 7-1-7 to stop deadly outbreaks in their tracks.
Making the world safer from epidemics
The COVID-19 pandemic drove home a stark reality: the world urgently needs to find and stop infectious disease outbreaks faster. Developed and refined with our partners Brazil, Ethiopia, Liberia, Nigeria, and Uganda, the 7-1-7 target we proposed in 2021 is the first real-time, start-to-end assessment of how quickly health systems detect and contain epidemic threats. In 2024, global organizations including WHO, the World Bank and the Global Fund increasingly relied on 7-1-7 and, more importantly, more than two dozen hosted by Resolve to Save Lives, have enabled countries all over the world, from Costa Rica to Kenya, to self-train on 7-1-7 to stop deadly outbreaks in their tracks.
Transforming global nutrition
“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food,” said Hippocrates, but unhealthy diets — especially those with too much salt — are a leading contributor to heart disease and premature death. Meaningful change starts with improvements to the food supply. Trans fat alone contributed to as many as 500,000 premature deaths every year before we partnered with WHO . Now, 63 countries have protected 3.7 billion people with best-practice bans, and WHO’s new validation program recognized Denmark, Lithuania, Poland, Saudi Arabia and Thailand with the first five awards for their groundbreaking work helping rid the world of this invisible killer.
Taking down the world’s leading killer: high blood pressure
Hypertension rarely makes headlines, despite being responsible for 10 million needless tragedies every year––10 million families robbed of a loved one, a breadwinner, a caretaker. Since our inception in 2017, we’ve been committed to keeping hypertension in the global spotlight and working with our partners to get it under control. With large-scale programs and strategies that make care more accessible to all, our partners have enrolled more than 28 million people in treatment, leveraging our revolutionary digital tools and techniques to support health care workers and health systems to deliver quality care to even the most underserved communities.
Next year, (NCDs) as the General Assembly of the United Nations prepares its fourth high-level meeting on the prevention and control of NCDs, we’re committed to tackling the biggest bottleneck to global hypertension control and, as a result, NCD control: access to safe, affordable, and effective medications.
Accelerating action
Text to come?
Facing climate change with proactive strategies
Extreme weather is on the rise, and with it the risk of infectious disease outbreaks. We need proactive strategies to support health security in the face of climate change. One thing all the Epidemics That Didn’t Happen this year had in common: health systems were listening to early risk signals and acting swiftly. Meanwhile, our Collaborative Surveillance team has been working to connect people, systems and processes to make sure communities, public health officials, and policymakers have the best possible data to make life-or-death decisions and protect global health.
The power of primary care
One of the most powerful lessons we’ve learned since we set out on our mission to save lives in 2017 is that by strengthening countries can make an outsized impact on population health and resilience, and drive sustainable progress. In 2024, we saw rapid and powerful results from our “Epidemic-Ready Primary Health Care” program, designed to address the bottlenecks we uncovered through 7-1-7 over the past two years. Alerts more than doubled in participating facilities in a span of just nine months, and infection prevention and control improved from 56% to 93% during the same period. Meanwhile, digital innovations like mobile-optimized training for health care workers mean we can prepare health care workers to handle common and emerging threats at the click of a button.
In-country skill-building for sustainability
Resolve to Save Lives builds roads to a healthier future, but it’s the countries we partner with in the driver’s seat. As our shared innovations gained momentum in 2024, we focused on strengthening countries’ capacity to sustain progress and continuously improve. From Kenya’s self-led adoption of 7-1-7 Alliance tools to Nigeria’s landmark public health security bill, these milestones highlight the power of national leadership. Our Program Management for Epidemic Preparedness (PMEP) program cultivates the next generation of public health leaders, while tools such as the new IHR Benchmarks simplify emergency preparedness planning globally. Together, these efforts underscore our commitment to collaborative learning and country-led solutions for lasting impact.
How we did it
Financials 2024
With the funding entrusted to us, we strategically allocate our resources to maximize impact for our partners and drive progress in global public health.
Donors
None of this life-saving work would be possible without the support of our visionary funding partners.
Flexible, risk-tolerant funding from forward-thinkers like the Skoll Foundation and Tambourine have endowed Resolve to Save Lives with the unique capacity to prototype solutions to the world’s deadliest health threats, rapidly iterate to develop a proof of concept, and partner with national and global organizations to bring most effective approaches to scale. We thank all our funding partners for their investment in a healthier future.
Skoll Foundation
Tambourine
Founder’s Pledge
Lyda Hill Philanthropies
Wellcome Trust
Atria Health Collaborative
We still need your help
We’re known for making the most of the funds entrusted to us. Dr. Salam Gueye, Director of Emergencies for the World Health Organization Africa Region said:
$50,000 from Resolve to Save Lives is often more valuable than millions from another donor.
Since 2017 we have made tremendous progress with our partners. But to save 100 million lives over the coming decades, we need your help today.