About

The Index is an assessment and benchmarking of health security and related capabilities across 195 countries.

The Index accelerates the building of global capacity to prevent, detect, and respond to epidemics and pandemics. The Index advances change by providing objective and public data that:

• Creates political accountability for government investment in pandemic preparedness capacity.
• Assists donors and governments with evidence-based decisionmaking that leads to more effective resource prioritization and investment impact.
• Sets the global standard for biosecurity and pandemic preparedness.

To effectively advocate for more investment in biosecurity and pandemic preparedness capacity and better policies in this area, decisionmakers must be able to see what countries have accomplished and where their gaps are—as well as trends over time.

The 2021 Global Health Security Index assessed countries across 6 categories, 37 indicators, and 171 questions using publicly available information. The GHS Index benchmarks health security in the context of other factors critical to fighting outbreaks, such as political and security risks, the broader strength of the health system, and country adherence to global norms. The 2021 Index explains how aggregating publicly available data helps to create a transparent picture of national level health security gaps.

The first two editions of the GHS Index were published in 2019 and 2021 and developed in partnership among the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, working with Economist Impact.

Evolution and Importance of the GHS Index

The GHS Index supplies the most comprehensive source of data on national-level capacity across 195 countries to prevent, detect, and respond to pandemics—as well as being the only tool that can make regularly recurring assessments to track progress over time. The Index provides a singular resource to support data-driven decision-making, to maximize the impact of investments in biosecurity and pandemic preparedness in countries around the world, and to drive significant additional investment in this area.

The GHS Index framework incorporates feedback from an International Panel of Experts and lessons from the  COVID-19 pandemic and other epidemics and pandemics.

A team of more than 80 experienced field-based researchers from Economist Impact collects publicly available data focused on six aspects of each country’s preparedness: prevention, detection and reporting, rapid response, health systems, compliance with international norms, and risk environment. The research team studies how countries performed on external assessments against their performance during the COVID-19 pandemic, along with additional variables that influence country responses to the pandemic to capture the most comprehensive risk profile possible.

The results of the 2021 Index showed that even as many countries proved they could ramp up new capacities during the emergency—including setting up labs and creating cohorts of contact tracers to follow the spread of COVID-19—some responses were crippled by long-unaddressed weaknesses, such as lack of healthcare surge capacity and critical medical supplies.

Countries now have a more acute understanding of what this lack of preparedness means for their health and prosperity. The response to COVID-19 has shown that many factors—including public health and healthcare capacities, scientific understanding and countermeasure distribution, and social and economic resilience—play a pivotal role in how countries are able to respond during a pandemic.

The Index, launched in 2026, enables leaders to measure, finance, and advance improvements in health security and create an evidence-based accountability framework to track progress toward better epidemic and pandemic preparedness in Africa.

Created on the recommendation of African public health leaders, the AHS Index provides new data on health security targets across the continent, including preparedness indicators at the intersection of health and climate security.

The AHS Index uses innovative data collection and analytic approaches to enhance the Global Health Security (GHS) Index. It enables African leaders to track the impact of programs to improve health security on the continent and identify opportunities to advance epidemic and pandemic preparedness. In collaboration with African partners, the AHS Index evaluates data from a broad set of health security indicators, building on the GHS Index framework, and will include a focused analysis of African priorities:

• Preventing accidental and deliberate biological events (biosafety and biosecurity)
• Detecting and reporting emerging outbreaks (biosurveillance)
• Bolstering medical countermeasure development and deployment
• Assessing how climate change affects health security on the African continent and in subregions
• Evaluating how the African continent’s five regions have built regional capacities to augment national health security infrastructure

The AHS Index:

• Creates political accountability to incentivize governments to invest in pandemic preparedness capacity within their borders.
• Provides data for donors and governments to make evidence-based decisions to prioritize resource allocation more effectively, maximizing the impact of investments.
• Sets a standard for biosecurity and pandemic preparedness.

The AHS Index is developed by NTI, the Brown University Pandemic Center, Economist Enterprise, and Science for Africa Foundation, in collaboration with the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa), and University of Tunis El Manar (Tunis, Tunisia). Funding is provided by the Gates Foundation.