A regional virtual meeting of GOARN partners was held in February 2021 with attendance of 46 institutions from 10 countries in SEAR. The purpose of the meeting was to present the Region’s GOARN Plan of Work (PoW) for 2021 that aimed to expand the number of GOARN partners in SEAR, strengthen their engagement and exposure to international outbreak response efforts, and enhance outbreak response quality.
During the meeting, deliberations were conducted with the partners and potential partners to identify the challenges related to international deployments to assist in outbreak response, to enhance documentation, including monitoring and evaluation (M&E), and operational research (OR) during outbreaks. Effort was made to identify solutions some of these challenges including identification of potential funds, smoother administrative processes for deployment including regionalization of GOARN activities.