With thanks to Jackeline Alger, lead moderator for HIFA-Spanish.
Description and a comment from me below.
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The Wellcome Snakebite Innovation Prize
https://snakebiteprize.challenges.org/about/about-the-prize
The Wellcome Snakebite Innovation Prize is a £6.25 million challenge prize aiming to improve outcomes for people affected by snakebite in high-burden settings.
Entries are open until 12pm UTC 16 September 2026 to organisations around the world...
We need practical, diverse solutions – not just high-tech apps, but improvements in logistics, community trust, first aid, and referral systems.
Innovations are needed across the patient journey in order to support better community responses, help people receive appropriate care faster, diagnose and assess the type of care they need, and improve the quality of medical care snakebite patients receive.
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The WHO website tells us that around 5 million people get bitten by snakes annually. Of these, 1.8–2.7 million develop clinical illness and 81 000 to 138 000 die from complications. https://www.who.int/health-topics/snakebite#tab=tab_1
This prize is highly relevant to HIFA because we are talking specifically about ways to improve quality of care, from the moment the snake bites through transport and the health system.
Many lives could be saved if every person and every health worker had access to the basic knowledge and information they need to prevent and treat snakebite.
On behalf of HIFA, I would like to offer our platform to help achieve the above objectives. If YOU are thinking of putting together a funding proposal to receive Wellcom Funding, please consider the possibility of including a mutistakeholder discussion on HIFA as part of your proposal. This would be a relatvely small budget line: £500 for a HIFA Spotlight and £3000 for a full HIFA Project.
www.hifa.org/spotlights
www.hifa.org/projects
Best wishes, Neil
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org