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Learn about how ESIC came to be, what’s happening now, and what’s ahead

History

Six key events and processes have been milestones in ESIC’s development:

  • ESIC is announced at the UN General Assembly on 21 September 2024
  • a community-led planning process engages more than 200 people in five working groups and one planning group between January and June 2025, and this process yields the ESIC roadmap (in its infographic, 10 page and 50+ versions) and more than 30 reports (each of which is available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese and Spanish)
  • the Cape Town Consensus meeting is convened from 24-26 June 2025, culminating in the Cape Town Consensus Charter and the citizen call to action, all of which shaped the foundational investments and transitional arrangements
  • three announcements are made in the UN’s Goals Lounge on 21 September 2025: 1) a near doubling of the initial ESIC financial commitment, bringing us to US$126 million mobilized in little under a year; 2) five proposed foundational investments that directly address 16 of the 40 solutions proposed in the ESIC roadmap, and which indirectly address many more; and 3) transitional arrangements will support funding, governing and coordinating ESIC for collective impact
  • a series of three touchpoints about the proposed open data system is convened in October and November 2025 and a seven-member planning group is tasked with working together from mid-January to mid-March 2026 to draft a proposal for the open data system that can be brought back to the community for feedback
  • the Funder executive began meeting in the Steering group began meeting in September 2025, the Steering group began meeting in December 2025, and the Communities council began meeting in January 2026.

The founding executive lead for ESIC at the Wellcome Trust, Tariq Khokhar, passed the ESIC baton at the end of January 2026.

Key documents produced for these events and through these processes can be found here. Recordings of some of the events can be found here. The full array of documents and recordings produced through the planning process can be found on the now-archived  ESIC planning process website. The full array of documents and recordings produced through the Global Commission on Evidence to Address Societal Challenges (or Global Evidence Commission for short) – which led the initial push for this transformation in the global evidence architecture – can be found on the now-archived Global Evidence Commission website (including report 2022 and updates 2023, 2024 and 2025, all of which are available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish, and with report 2022 available in Russian).