“Building Bridges will foster long-term relationships and sustainable lines of communication between researchers, clinicians, journalists, policymakers, and medical librarians. In so doing, we will create a resilient communication network to disseminate health information to the public and to policymakers, routinely and during humanitarian crises.”

According to the declaration, the initiative also hopes to build national capacity for researchers, policymakers and knowledge intermediaries such as journalists, librarians and journal editors to disseminate timely and evidence-based health information.

“If researchers talk to policymakers we can research about a problem and the media can amplify it,” adds Tumwine, who is also the editor-in-chief of the African Health Sciences journal.