The Global Week for Action on NCDs in 2023 held from 14 - 21 September was a campaign like no other, surpassing previous years in reach and impact. More voices than ever before joined the campaign both virtually and in-person to share the 2023 message: The Moment for Caring is Now.

The campaign ended in September, but our work for 2023 is only coming to an end now, after completing an important step in any campaign or initiative: evaluation. Our evaluation of the GW4A 2023 campaign provides new insights and valuable lessons learned. These yearly evaluations are key for ensuring that each Global Week for Action is bigger and better than the ones that came before.

We thank our members and partners for their engagement in this year’s campaign, which only increases year on year. In 2023, they added 68 events to the Map of Impact, ranging from mobilisation and community events, to social media campaigns, to launches of reports and publications, and more. Some of the highlights include high-level meetings in Cambodia and Bangladesh ahead of the UN High-Level Meeting on Universal Health Coverage (UN HLM on UHC), and a symposium by Tanzania NCD Alliance titled “Voices of resilience: Real stories from those living with NCDs.” The Healthy Latin America Coalition (CLAS), together with NCDA, held a virtual regional multistakeholder dialogue, “Accelerating progress on NCDs: Connecting Universal Coverage regional priorities with the NCD financing agenda in the Americas and the Caribbean”. These are just a sample of activities that brought the NCD community together to advance towards our shared goals through the GW4A.

In 2023 online engagement also reached new heights, with the number of visitors to the Global Week for Action website up from last year by 164%, for a total of 91,700 individual visitors. Engagement time and rate was higher too, by 83% and 64% respectively. This is thanks in large part to the contributions from our members and partners; for instance, the members’ blogs page was one of the year’s most popular, bringing unique perspectives on important issues like closing the care gap for women and girls, increasing equity in access to care, and the role that private sector should play in improving NCD care.

Another popular feature this year were the video case studies created with NCDA partners. For instance, a short video on how Jordan’s government and civil society are collaborating to reduce the NCD burden among refugees and marginalised Jordanians, produced with Novo Nordisk and World Diabetes Foundation, had been viewed 165K times as of end October. Together, our videos were viewed 1,324,555 times, with most users watching the complete video until the end.

Partner research reports helped support topline messages with hard evidence, like the report Paying the Price: A deep dive into the household economic burden of care experienced by people living with NCDs, created by NCDA with the George Institute for Global Health. Spending Wisely: Exploring the economic and societal benefits of integrating HIV/AIDS and NCDs service delivery, with RTI and Viatris, was a key element of the campaign and was launched just one week before the week kicked-off.

The campaign launch virtual event itself was another major achievement, with an unprecedented 1,191 registrants and 583 participants, nearly all of whom stayed until the end of the event. Co-hosted with the World Health Organization and World Diabetes Foundation, the discussions focused on sustainable multisectoral and multistakeholder collaboration to speed up progress on NCDs. This kind of high-level engagement, and messages of support shared by WHO Director General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and WHO Global Ambassador for NCDs, Michael Bloomberg, called plenty of attention from the press, with 846 media mentions.

The ‘care’ theme in 2023 coincided with the UN HLM on Universal Health Coverage, and played a role in aligning and uniting Heads of State and Government. On the day of the HLM, a group of six heads of state and government met on the sidelines of HLM UHC to speak specifically about NCDs, illustrating the connections between NCDs, pandemic preparedness, and sustainable development. Many leaders, such as those from Barbados, Timor Leste, and Mauritius, demonstrated their commitment to take the NCD agenda further, both in their own countries and at the highest level as we approach the UN HLM on NCDs taking place in 2025. We congratulate these GW4A ‘Global Champions’ for their leadership in advancing the NCD agenda.

We thank all those who help make the campaign a success each year, bringing us closer to a world that is free from preventable suffering and death caused by NCDs. Read more about the achievements of the Global Week for Action on NCDs in 2023 and the key learnings we have acquired through them here.