Meningitis Research Foundation (MRF) is delighted to announce two new international partnerships that will support the charity in its work to defeat meningitis. The partnerships with UNICEF and the Tableau Foundation will support the implementation of the new global roadmap to defeat meningitis, which is being launched on September 28th 2021, by the World Health Organization (WHO).
The Tableau Foundation are supporting MRF with a new 3-year package of support worth $500,000 for a data hub called the Meningitis Progress Tracker, which will monitor the impact of the roadmap. The support from tableau includes a dedicated server, software licenses, access to technical support and financial contribution to project costs.
The Meningitis Progress Tracker is the main tool being used to communicate progress against the new global roadmap and has been developed in-house by MRF with the support of technical advisors from Keytree (a Deloitte company) and Infolabs.
With support from the MRF team, data within the tracker is currently being used to help WHO regional teams select priority countries for implementation of the roadmap. Since its pilot launch in 2019, the tracker has now been used over 35,000 times in more than 80 countries.
As co-lead on the advocacy and engagement pillar of the new roadmap, UNICEF are supporting MRF to create a global communications framework and tools for raising awareness of meningitis. The new support will also help support elements of the Meningitis Progress Tracker. Securing this support has enabled MRF to become a registered United Nations supplier for the first time.
Welcoming the news, Vinny Smith Chief Executive of MRF, said: “It’s been a pleasure to work alongside UNICEF and Tableau for some time now, but these new agreements, which have been secured at the same time as the new global roadmap really move us into a new era of action. This support shows real confidence of some major global health organisations in our work. With their support and our work together, we really will help defeat meningitis by 2030.”
Neal Myrick, Global Head of Tableau Foundation, adds: “We’ve been delighted to see MRF explore the potential of Tableau software to help visualise the global burden of meningitis and with this new support we look forward to seeing their great work continue at pace.”
Dr Imran Murza, UNICEF, comments: “We have enjoyed working more closely with MRF over the past 3 years and this new partnership for support on global communications and better data for meningitis takes our work together to the next level. We’re excited to see this work develop further towards our common goal of defeating meningitis”.
View the Meningitis Progress Tracker