icddr,b

Purpose

P001405001: This grant represents Canada’s long-term institutional support to icddr,b, formerly known as the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh. icddr,b uses these funds, along with other donors’ funding to achieve its mandate. icddr,b’s mandate is to find low-cost innovative solutions to public health problems facing low- and middle-income countries through scientific research. icddr,b’s research and health services contribute to the well-being of women and girls in the area of disease prevention and control (including cholera vaccines administered to Rohingya refugees), sexual and reproductive health and rights, prevention and treatment of malnutrition, prevention of child marriage, and the first population-based research on gender-based violence in Bangladesh. As part of icddr,b’s ‘Core Donor Group’ (Canada, UK, Sweden), Canada’s funding is supporting the delivery of free health care, especially for women and children, and strengthening icddr,b’s operations through investment in research technologies, human resources development, and initiatives to improve icddr,b’s effectiveness, efficiency, and long-term viability. P001405002: The proposed project would provide 5 years of institutional support to icddr,b, a leading global health research centre located in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The institutional support would include capital investments in improved research technologies, develop human resources, and enable the organization to pursue its strategic research agenda to produce evidence of effective low-cost health solutions, including in SRHR. icddr,b’s mandate is to find low-cost innovative solutions to public health problems facing low- and middle-income countries through scientific research. The five main areas of icddr’b’s work are: 1) innovative research to identify low-cost solutions to public health problems in poor countries; 2) implementation and scale-up of proven public health interventions; 3) policy impact through delivering evidence for effective health strategies and policy interventions; 4) humanitarian action (including hospitals and laboratories, disease outbreak responses and training); and 5) the Matlab Demographic Surveillance site, the world’s most comprehensive and longest running longitudinal population study, which is also a testing ground for research on global vaccines, community health care delivery, reducing maternal mortality and malnutrition, the identification of emerging diseases, and the effects of environmental and socio-cultural factors on health. The additional activities to be undertaken by icddr,b to combat COVID-19 are: training healthcare workers treating COVID-19 patients in Bangladesh; strengthening testing capacity for COVID-19 in 10 districts in Bangladesh; conducting clinical trials for prevention and treatment of COVID-19 with drug and vitamin regimes for front-line workers and at risk populations, and treatment for those unable to access standard treatment; treatment of COVID-19 patients with severe pneumonia by trialing an adaptive version of locally made mechanical ventilator; assessing case management capacity of public health care services regarding COVID-19; assessment of food insecurity and undernutrition among urban and rural people during and after the pandemic in Bangladesh and development of a guideline for providing them a basic food package for maintaining daily dietary requirements to combat undernutrition.