Wellcome’s vision is a healthier future for everyone. We work to achieve this by supporting science to solve the urgent health challenges facing everyone.
Often, the people and communities whose health has the most to gain from the science we support are the most marginalised, disadvantaged and least well served by today’s global health systems. But the health benefits of science should be available to everyone.
To address this imbalance, we’re embedding equity in everything we do.
The communities most affected by health challenges are essential partners who must be involved. They must be involved in projects right from the start – from design through to implementing solutions in the real world. We also want to increase diversity among those who do research and ensure that research participants are representative of all the people affected.
We want populations studied in genome research to be properly representative of the world. Lack of diversity has compromised progress, limited applicability of research and led to disparities in health outcomes. But this can change.
We believe diverse research communities generate more relevant and impactful results. A diverse team of researchers broadens thinking, may be more likely to spot unintentional bias in the design of a study and more sensitive to the needs of different communities. For relevant results, it is vital to ensure all the people who need to be involved in a study are able to take part. Practical or cultural barriers that could prevent this need to be identified early and worked around.
When research is led from and done within affected communities, the resulting insights have a head start towards being implemented and impactful in the real world. That’s because working with communities means research is directly informed by people’s needs, and the outputs are more trusted and accessible.
We want the research we support to go forward and have an impact in the real world. To make this happen, action is often needed from decision makers – the people who can affect the wider circumstances of the most affected communities or address inequalities in global health systems.
As equity is central to delivering our mission, it is essential that we continue working to build and maintain a workplace culture where people from all backgrounds feel seen, heard and valued, and supported to thrive. We must have equity on the inside to catalyse equity elsewhere.
Our Equity team works to support, inform and enable staff across everything we do, sharing expertise and evidence.
Equity underpins our strategy, mission and vision. But we must be intentional about embedding equity in order to succeed.
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Equity is helping us deliver our mission across all the work we’re supporting and leading. And we know we can make a bigger difference by not acting alone, so we collaborate with others. For example, co-founding EDIS, a coalition of organisations working within the science and health research sector committed to improving equality, diversity and inclusion. We share our insights and make tools and resources open access wherever possible. We’re also supporting work to generate evidence of the benefits of working towards diversity. Here are a few examples of our work in action.
Africa and Asia are at the sharp end of some of the biggest global health and development challenges and need funding and world-class teams to tackle this. We’re working to support researchers in Africa and Asia to build research ecosystems, develop the next generation of researchers and improve health for billions of people.
To solve the urgent health challenges facing everyone, we need people from all backgrounds to contribute insights and expertise. We launched this targeted funding to help underrepresented researchers in the UK progress their careers and contribute to life-saving discoveries.
Lived experience expertise from a variety of communities is important to shape mental health science through first-hand knowledge and insights. A network of 17 experts in Australia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa and the UK advise on all aspects of our mental health programme’s work.
Wellcome helped to ensure that this collaborative effort to set out a roadmap for improving and optimising the way global health initiatives are financed was inclusive, especially of lower- and middle-income countries, and primed to help address power imbalances in the wider health ecosystem.
We want to tackle the lack of diversity in genomic data, which has compromised research progress. Our report examines how representative human genomic datasets are, identifies opportunities for funders to make a positive impact, and is a call to action for the wider community to pay attention to data diversity when designing experiments and studies.
Climate change is already impacting human health, but some people are and will continue to be more severely affected, for example, those living in lower- and middle-income countries and in socially and economically marginalised areas of cities. A diversity of voices from affected locations is critical to tackle this complex problem.
