The ESPEN (Expanded Special Project for Elimination of NTD) portal was created through a joint venture by BMGF and the WHO regional office for Africa (WHO AFRO) to enhance the use of NTD data for decision making and accelerate the control and elimination of the five most prevalent NTDs.

However, the national NTD programs did not optimally utilized the portal to facilitate decision-making due to several reasons including a lack of technical capacity to access and manipulate the portal data

As a result, BMGF engaged the Solina Health-eHealth Africa consortium to support WHO AFRO to holistically evaluate the ESPEN portal to inform investments in transitioning the portal from a data repository to an active ‘data for decision-making’ resource between 2022 and 2025