Collaboration
Since 2016, the Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology, which is a WHO Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention, Nutrition and Physical Activity, has been supporting WHO’s work on obesity prevention, nutrition and physical activity.
In agreement with WHO, the collaborating centre has provided high-level technical expertise in data policy.
Most significantly, the centre also acted as a lead coordinator in the development of a training course with the Regional Office for Europe, managing eight other collaborating centres to harmonize technical content.
WHO provided the strategic framework, access to global priorities on noncommunicable diseases, and the platform of the WHO Academy to scale the course into a global standard.
Through this process, the collaboration directly advanced WHO’s mission to provide high-quality, scalable training for health professionals.
Contributions
A significant contribution in this collaboration was the development of the WHO Academy online course Noncommunicable diseases policy essentials.
Designed for public health policy professionals, the course examines the growing global challenge of NCDs, explores the underlying causes of major conditions such as cardiovascular diseases, cancers, diabetes and chronic respiratory diseases, and presents evidence-based strategies for their prevention and control using WHO recommended approaches.
The course was grounded in the experience gained from two online pilot courses that the collaborating centre developed and led over a two-year period. These pilots provided an essential testing ground to assess how well the content resonated with the target audience, to evaluate its effectiveness in strengthening competencies and to refine both the pedagogical approach and the digital learning design before transitioning the material to the WHO Academy platform.
Over this two-year phase, the centre also gathered insights into how diverse professional groups within the NCD field engage with online learning, revealing patterns of uptake, preferred learning formats and the types of support learners need to succeed.
Knowledge transfer
An innovation of this project was the adoption of a collaborative consortium model in which one collaborating centre coordinated the work of several others, ensuring that all outputs were aligned with participant needs and with the overarching WHO curricula. 
This approach established a new model for cooperation among centres, with the lead institution managing a cluster of partners to deliver a single WHO product while also helping WHO build the internal capacity needed to transition pilot‑level content into the formal WHO Academy ecosystem.
Through this arrangement, WHO benefited from the centre’s ability to orchestrate multiple expert institutions and to shape a curriculum grounded in rigorous teaching and learning methods, while the centre itself gained the opportunity to see its academic expertise translated into global policy and practice through the WHO Academy, expanding its international reach and impact.
This collaboration has reinforced the value of using a multi‑year pilot phase to gather data on participant acceptability before a full global launch, demonstrating how iterative testing can significantly enhance the quality and relevance of the final product.
The collaboration has laid the groundwork for using this coordinated collaborating‑centre model in future curriculum development.
Building on the foundations already established, the next step is to pursue translation and regional adaptation of the WHO Academy course, ensuring that the content developed by the collaborating centres reaches a wider global audience and is tailored to diverse regional needs.