Turning two decades of global health data into one trusted portal

Impact Global Health's R&D pipeline data has been tracked since 2019 and covers everything from early-stage candidates to approved health products - yet until recently, it lived scattered across five separate portals, each with its own dashboards and learning curve. To fix that, Akvo partnered with Impact Global Health to design and build a single, unified public-facing portal, giving funders, researchers, policymakers, and advocates one trusted place to understand where global health innovation stands and where the gaps remain.


Partners

 Impact Global Health (IGH)


Locations

Global


Sector

Global Health


Services

Stakeholder mapping and needs assessment,

Impact strategy,

Data strategy,

Data analysis and insights creation,

Data management,

Capacity building,

Platform creation

The challenge

Impact Global Health's R&D pipeline data - tracked since 2019, covering everything from early-stage candidates to approved health products - lived across different health areas covering neglected diseases, emerging infectious diseases, snakebite, and women's health. It was valuable, but nobody could see the full picture across all of global health: not funders trying to compare investments, not researchers hunting for gaps, not the public trying to understand where global health R&D actually stood.

What IGH really needed wasn't just a new interface,  but a deeper understanding of the people who'd use it, and what they needed from the data day to day.

The solution

Start with the data, not the design

Before a single dashboard was sketched, Akvo dove straight into IGH's raw pipeline data - rough, exploratory analysis aimed at one question: what does this data actually want to say? That early digging surfaced real gaps and opportunities hiding in the numbers, and became the seed for everything that followed.

 

Design with users, not for them

Akvo's approach to design is built around five deliberate stages:

This meant grounding the work in real audiences - funders looking to prioritise where their money goes, advocates needing numbers to back up their arguments, researchers digging into the details to shape their next line of inquiry, and programme officers comparing the density of different portfolios - and testing early concepts with real users before committing to a build. When some designs weren't yet signed off, the team made a deliberately pragmatic call: get a working version in front of people, rather than chase pixel-perfect polish on ideas that might still change.

 

Build in the open, test on the real thing

Rather than disappearing for months and reappearing with a "finished" product, Akvo pushed working versions to a live staging environment as soon as pieces were functional - even while other sections were still placeholders. The first round of real user testing ran while the platform was still being built, and feedback flowed straight into a shared task list so fixes landed the same week.

The impact

The unified Pipeline Portal launched in mid-2026, giving IGH and its community a single, trusted home for global health R&D data for the first time. 

IGH now has a unique platform to showcase its data, validated by real users before launch, and refined through active, ongoing partnership. The method mattered as much as the product: understand the data first, design with real people, build in the open, and keep listening after launch.