Press releases
Legal & General backs major global initiative to help prevent future health emergencies
Legal & General announces that it has today formed part of a coalition of 22 leading businesses, charities, researchers and educators, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Google and the University of Cambridge, to launch the Trinity Challenge, a global initiative to help populations throughout the world better prevent and respond to public health emergencies.
14 Sep 2020
Led by Dame Sally Davies, England’s former Chief Medical Officer and the Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department of Health, the Trinity Challenge will award a £10m prize fund for breakthrough solutions which harness the power of data and analytics. The initiative will seek to develop innovations in identifying, responding to and recovering from future public health crises, with the ambition to ensure that at least one billion more people are better protected.
The Trinity Challenge is calling on global participants to submit impact-led ideas on how to safeguard our health and economic systems from the threat of global health emergencies. With entries closing in January 2021, chosen submissions will be supported with access to finance, data and resources from the Founding Members, to maximise the effectiveness of their solutions and leverage the world-leading expertise and innovation of these institutions.
The power of collaboration
Participants will be organised into Challenge Teams, forging cross-geography collaborations which reflect a diverse set of backgrounds and specialisms. Data and analytic resources will be made available by the coalition to drive a new form of collaboration. From anywhere in the world, Challenge Teams will be able to partner with global experts, drawing on their resources and support.
Identification, response, and recovery
The Trinity Challenge is designed around sourcing and developing impact-led solutions that reflect the holistic nature of future health emergencies. Challenge Teams will develop change-making ideas, tools and insights relevant to each of the three stages of these emergencies:
- Identification: Building early-warning systems and ground-breaking technologies to identify pathogens or outbreaks before they cause great harm.
- Response: Developing insights and capabilities to target interventions with maximal effectiveness and at minimal cost.
- Recovery: Strengthening the social and economic revival following health emergencies and constructing an equitable path toward an inclusive recovery.
Dame Sally Davies: "There will be another COVID-19, and there is an opportunity for the international community to learn lessons now and prepare for the future. The Trinity Challenge is a recognition by business, academia and philanthropy of the need for new, breakthrough ideas and approaches to beat the next pandemic.My career has been inspired by making sure all people, everywhere, have the best possible life chances. Health is integral to that, and we are seeing this now more than ever.
We need to come together to make sure this never happens again.
We need new ways of working, new partnerships, new ideas, and believe that together this strong and growing coalition can and will generate acts that protect and improve lives and livelihoods everywhere."
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of WHO: "The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that the world was not prepared. Together, we all have a responsibility to do everything we can to ensure a pandemic of this magnitude, with this level of disruption to lives and livelihoods, never happens again. We welcome the Trinity Challenge, which brings together multiple partners to harness the power of data and analytics for a safer world."
Nigel Wilson, Chief Executive of Legal & General: "The private sector must play a key role in driving innovations to protect us from future public health crises, ensuring that never again will there be an event which brings about illness, suffering and economic disruption on the scale of COVID-19."
Kerrigan Procter, Chief Executive of Legal & General Capital: "This initiative truly has the power to change the world, bridging sectors, skillsets and geographies in an effort to prevent diseases reaching pandemic or epidemic levels. What’s particularly exciting about the Trinity Challenge is its focus of real-world data and collaboration to, for instance, pinpoint when and where future outbreaks are likely to occur, or discover which interventions are most effective for protecting vulnerable population groups."
The Trinity Challenge is now open for global submissions and participants can register their interest at https://thetrinitychallenge.org. The submission period will close in January 2021.
Convened by Dame Sally Davies in her role as Master of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, the Trinity Challenge’s 22 Founding Members represent a diverse coalition of world leading organisations across the private, public and social sectors, united by the common aim of using data and advanced analytics to develop insights and practical actions to contribute to a world better protected from health emergencies. Through this support, the Trinity Challenge will fund and facilitate partnerships across a wide range of sectors, including researchers, academics, economists and behavioural scientists.
The challenge focuses on solutions to support and strengthen the global public health ecosystem in a robust and inclusive way. Solutions will be fielded globally through an open and accessible process to bring the best minds and ideas together with the aim of developing insights which will benefit the world in the future.
The full list of Founding Members are: Aviva, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Brunswick Group, University of Cambridge, Discovery Limited, Facebook, Global Virome Project, Google, HKUMed, Imperial College London, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Internews, Legal and General, LSE, McKinsey and Company, Microsoft, Northeastern University, Reckitt Benckiser, Tencent, Zenysis Technologies, GSK and Optum.
Notes to editors
Established in 1836, Legal & General is one of the UK's leading financial services groups and a major global investor, with £1.2 trillion in total assets under management1 of which 40% is international. We have a unique and highly synergistic business model, which continues to drive strong returns. Legal & General provides powerful asset origination and management capabilities directly to clients, which also underpin our leading retirement and protection solutions. We are a leading international player in Pension Risk Transfer, in UK and US life insurance, and in UK workplace pensions and retirement income. Our purpose is to improve the lives of our customers and create value for our shareholders. Through inclusive capitalism, we are investing in long-term assets, such as real estate and infrastructure, that can help build a better society for the future.
1Data as at 31 December 2023.
Legal & General Capital (LGC) is Legal & General Group’s alternative asset platform, creating assets for Legal & General Retirement and third-party clients in order to achieve improved risk-adjusted returns for our shareholders. LGC has built its capabilities in a range of alternative sectors, including in residential property; specialist commercial real estate; clean energy; alternative credit; and venture capital, which are all supported by long-term structural growth drivers, meet a financing gap, and respond to a scarcity of supply that is underpinned by enduring societal needs.