IDB and The GovLab Partner to Bring Innovation to the Fight Against COVID-19

To address the pressing need for more effective strategies for managing the current COVID-19 and other future pandemics, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and The GovLab at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, turned to new technology to convene the world’s wisdom into “one room.” From July to November 2020 The GovLab and the IDB partnered to conduct an innovative rapid policy advising initiative, “Smarter Crowdsourcing in the Age of Coronavirus.”

“Government leaders and public sector entrepreneurs need to invest in and strengthen the infrastructure and systems that will prepare our communities for the ‘known unknowns' -- the pandemics that we haven’t yet faced,” says Professor Beth Noveck, Director of The GovLab. “We know from experience that sustained investments in data systems, public health infrastructure, and government capacity are the strongest line of defense against future disruptions and public health threats. Yet despite this preparedness imperative and countless dollars and hours of investment in activities meant to strengthen public health infrastructure, our world was collectively and unfortunately unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic.”

“This project was designed and executed primarily to address the pressing need for targeted solutions to urgent issues like testing strategies, protecting vulnerable populations, and building strong public health communications programs,” says Diana Pinto Masis, Health Lead Specialist at the IDB. “The Smarter Crowdsourcing process demonstrates how we can all do better. Embracing collective wisdom and humbly seeking counsel and advice is a liberating, democratizing, cost effective, and ultimately uplifting story: to solve our world's most pressing problems, leaders need simply ask and, as we saw with this project, countless people will selflessly give of their time, knowhow, insight and experience.”

Throughout the project, a joint team from the IDB and The GovLab worked with partner governments in Latin America and the Caribbean to identify, define, contextualize, and prioritize work areas to address COVID-19. The result of these engagements is a set recommendations and implementation plans that articulate actions governments could take to address the specific challenges presented by the pandemic.

The results of this project are a comprehensive set of knowledge tools, all publicly available on the initiative website in three languages. “Our goal for this project was to give governments and public sector leaders innovative and cutting-edge tools and information that would boost their pandemic responses,” says Henri Hammond-Paul, Health Policy Advisor at The GovLab.

Professor Victoria Alsina, Project Coordinator and Senior Fellow at The GovLab, managed the project and ensured that governments were active participants and partners throughout the entire project. “We worked with our government partners to design and execute knowledge tools that they want to use,” says Professor Alsina. “Governments want information that is consumable, actionable, and ultimately helps them do their important work more easily and more effectively. This is why we translated our recommendations into different tools for different government audiences. We have executive memos for senior level government officials and we have in depth action plans for government workers who are actually implementing programs and doing the day-to-day public health response work.” The tools also include an interactive website that hosts a sortable and searchable catalogue of all recommendations and strategies.

All the materials from the project can be found on the project website. In addition to the summary report and the executive memos, visitors to the site can explore the searchable catalogue of recommendations and review all the session materials from the six deliberations, including a catalogue of challenges, problem briefs, regional reports documenting contextualized challenges, conference takeaways and implementation memos.

As she closed the project, Noveck reflected, “the tragedy of lives lost and livelihoods destroyed demands of us that we work differently, taking advantage of the collective intelligence of our global and local communities to solve our hardest problems.”