A year ago, WHO have created the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund to ensure a systematic response to the unprecedented show of support by individuals and companies to help fight WHO against COVID-19 Situation. They developed it as an innovative platform to allow private companies, individuals and other small or big organizations to contribute directly to all the efforts that will be taken to prevent, detect, and rectify COVID-19 outbreak around the world.

First year of this fund has seen some unprecedented solidarity and over 661 000 donors have contributed nearly US$250 million to this date. The funds have been used to provide critical personal protective equipment, medical supplies, and testing kits to millions of frontline workers and also to manage misinformation, support vulnerable populations like refugees and displaced persons and to help speed up the tests, and treatments and researches on vaccine.

Solidarity Response Fund has always been a critical source of funding for the WHO’s response system. WHO has shipped near about 250 million personal protective equipment and vital medical supplies including oxygen across 150 countries, supported hundreds of national and subnational laboratories with technical support, managed around 250 million COVID-19 tests with the deployment of over 180 teams across the world and managed 12 000+ beds in health systems that might otherwise have left overwhelmed.

Even with this progress, current trends indicates that the fight is still far from over. That is the only reason the fund launched a renewed call for action to contribute to the estimated US$ 1.96 billion which is required by WHO to respond to remaining and new challenges in the fight against COVID-19 in 2021.

These contributions to the next phase of the fund will support WHO and its partners to overcome transmission, counter misinformation, reduce vulnerability, secure the unsafe, reduce mortality and boost up fair access to new COVID-19 tools—including through WHO’s activity with the ACT-Accelerator, to scale up vaccination globally, particularly for the most vulnerable countries, and ensure the delivery of life-sustaining supplies.