No data, no direction

Every year millions of dollars flow into research for diseases that affect the world's most vulnerable people. Without a way to track that funding, it is nearly impossible to know who the key players are and if investment is going where it is needed most. The G-FINDER project has filled this gap for almost two decades, collecting funding data on an annual basis since 2008.

At Impact Global Health, we gather data on investment into R&D for new medical products targeting neglected diseases, emerging infectious diseases, and women’s health conditions via the annual G-FINDER survey. Close to 300 organisations from across the world participate in this survey, reporting their funding for basic research and the development of new drugs, vaccines, diagnostics and other tools for global health priorities that disproportionately affect people in low- and middle-income countries. Survey participants span the full R&D pipeline; from funders such as national governments and philanthropic organisations, to product developers including pharmaceutical companies and academic institutions, as well as intermediaries like product development partnerships (PDPs).

The result is a gold standard data source that does far more than just report on numbers. The data helps the global health community identify funding gaps, make the case for innovation, and inform critical investment decisions. And because all data is freely available on our G-FINDER data portal, anyone can use it; it shapes the Donor Tracker's analysis of global health funding and serves as the WHO Global Observatory on Health R&D's primary source of data on neglected disease R&D investment.

One of the biggest challenges of running the G-FINDER survey is that we are asking very different kinds of organisations to report their data in a consistent, comparable way. A government ministry and a small biotech firm don't speak the same financial language, so a significant part of our work is helping respondents understand what we are asking, and why, in a way that makes sense for their context.

And the work doesn't stop when the survey closes. Behind every clean data point is a process of follow-up emails, clarifying questions, and a careful validation of figures that don't quite add up. All essential steps that ensure the final dataset is something the global health community can genuinely rely on. By the time one annual cycle wraps up, the groundwork for the next is already underway: reviewing our scope, improving our systems, and working to bring new participants on board.

The more sources we hear from, the more accurate and complete our picture of global health R&D funding becomes. That is why we continuously work to expand our reach by inviting new survey respondents, tapping into additional public data sources, and bringing in voices from more countries.

Some of the changes we have made this year speak specifically to the accessibility of the survey. Survey materials are now available in French and Portuguese, two languages spoken across a significant number of the low- and middle-income countries at the heart of our research. We have also ensured our online survey is compatible with Google Translate, meaning respondents can access it in virtually any language they need. For organisations that have previously faced a language barrier when engaging with G-FINDER, this is a significant step toward more equitable participation.

Beyond language, we have an open invitation to any respondent who finds our standard reporting format difficult to work with. This could be due to the way their financial data is structured internally, or simply because our categories don't map neatly onto their own. No contribution is too difficult to accommodate.

G-FINDER exists to provide an accurate, reliable picture of where global health R&D funding is going, and to make that picture freely available to anyone who needs it. When funders, policymakers and researchers can see clearly where money is flowing, and where it isn't, they are better able to make decisions that have a real impact on global health outcomes.

The accessibility improvements we are making are part of that same commitment. Every new participant we bring into the survey, every language barrier we remove, and every reporting obstacle we smooth out adds to the completeness and reliability of the data. That matters, because the value of G-FINDER is only as strong as the breadth of contributions behind it.  Whether you're a longstanding participant with ideas for improvement, or an organisation that hasn't yet taken part in the survey, we’d love to hear from you about your experience of the G-FINDER survey.