Members of the ALIGN Consortium executive committee meet in Nairobi, Kenya, in August 2025.
Published October 30, 2025 under Partnerships
There is no shortage of innovative ideas that show promise of improving health interventions in low- and middle-income countries. But such innovations often fail to reach markets quickly or equitably. According to one study, it can take more than 13 years for a new health product to reach a 20 percent uptake threshold in low- and middle-income countries, more than twice as long as in wealthier nations.
To help close that gap, the Duke Global Health Innovation Center (Duke GHIC) has launched the ALIGN Consortium, a collaboration with organizations in three African countries that will work to speed up the pipeline for promising innovations to reach the market. Through research and policy advocacy, the consortium is aiming to remove obstacles in how innovations are assessed, financed and introduced.
“Our goal is to create more accountable, resilient health systems that deliver better health outcomes faster for all, and to generate insights, tools, and resources that can be used by stakeholders around the world.,” says Krishna Udayakumar, M.D., a professor with the Duke Global Health Institute and director of Duke GHIC.
Members of the consortium include the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC), Keprecon and ENDA Santé. The partners will support national governments in Kenya, Senegal and South Africa to evaluate and strengthen the critical decision-making systems that determine how health product innovations are prioritized and introduced. The consortium recently published a working paper outlining an evidence-based approach for improving how countries decide which innovations to prioritize, how to finance them, and how to prepare systems for safe, sustainable innovation rollouts.
But the success of the consortium’s efforts won’t necessarily be measured by an increase in product introductions, Udayakumar says. Instead, the goal will be to ensure countries’ decisions about which products to support are more timely, transparent, driven by data, and aligned with national priorities.
