Public health intelligence - 2026

In 2025, the World Health Organization's African Region continued to grapple with a diverse array of public health challenges, including frequent infectious disease outbreaks, humanitarian crises, climate-related disasters, and heightened cross-border health risks. A crucial element in the World Health Organization's African Region's (WHO AFRO) strategy for tackling these issues was Public Health Intelligence (PHI).

PHI served as the backbone for the Region's efforts to enhance early detection, risk evaluation, situational awareness, and evidence-based decision-making in the face of health emergencies.

Throughout 2025, the Regional Public Health Intelligence team played a pivotal role in orchestrating various surveillance and intelligence-gathering activities. These included event-based surveillance, epidemic intelligence, rapid risk assessments, humanitarian situation analyses, and analytical information products. The team's work was instrumental in providing essential support to Member States and partners as they navigated and responded to acute public health events across the Region.

A significant development in 2025 was the substantial growth of the Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources (EIOS) initiative. This initiative aimed to harness information from a wide range of open sources to bolster epidemic intelligence capabilities. Moreover, the Region continued to integrate innovative intelligence approaches, such as speech-to-text radio mining and machine learning-driven signal classification. These advanced methods promised to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of PHI efforts in the years to come.