Background to the living hub

Decision-makers may want to identify organizations that are supporting decision-making with a specific topic or sectoral focus, with a specific type of resource (e.g., recommendations, evidence syntheses or data), and/or with a specific geographic or linguistic scope.

COVID-END partners – the African Centre for Evidence and the McMaster Health Forum – have created a living hub of COVID-19 knowledge hubs to help identify such organizations.

COVID-19 knowledge hubs are broadly defined as any publicly available platform whose main aim is to collate and share relevant data, research and other types of evidence related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Because the list of included hubs and the data available for each hub will be updated periodically, we refer to it as a ‘living’ hub of COVID-19 knowledge hubs.

The living hub of COVID-19 knowledge hubs can help people like these: 

• a social-services policymaker in Ghana may use the living hub of hubs to rapidly identify organizations in Ghana (or in English-speaking west African countries more generally) that may have already prepared locally relevant resources that can help to guide her country’s COVID-19 response;
• a stakeholder in Argentina may use it to look for comparative analyses of COVID-19 data from Latin American countries that are explained in Spanish and can be used in a briefing he is giving to peer organizations; and
• a research group may use it to avoid duplication when setting up a new COVID-19 knowledge hub and to improve coordination among existing hubs.

The living hub of COVID-19 knowledge hubs was developed through a systematic process of identification, screening and coding of hubs that met pre-defined eligibility criteria. Of the 440 hubs that were originally identified, 304 hubs met our eligibility criteria. 

For even richer detail, review the full dataset.