Who We Are

The CORE Group Partners Project (CGPP) is a multi-country, multi-partner initiative that supports governments to strengthen immunization systems, disease surveillance, and essential community-based health services, particularly in underserved and hard-to-reach areas. Since 1999, CGPP has implemented programming through partnerships with international non-governmental organizations (NGO) and local community-based organizations (CBOs). Established in 1999, CGPP works in close partnership with host-country governments to reinforce government-led health systems, improve access to essential services, and strengthen countries’ capacity to prevent, detect, and respond to public health threats. Since its inception, CGPP has worked in 19 countries, while in 2026, CGPP is supporting 13 countries.

CGPP’s work is rooted in global polio eradication, with a focus on strengthening routine immunization, improving the quality of vaccination campaigns, and supporting community-based surveillance for acute flaccid paralysis. This infrastructure has served as a foundation for expanded support to broader national health priorities, including surveillance for priority zoonotic and other outbreak-prone diseases, outbreak response, and essential maternal, child, and nutrition services. Across these areas, CGPP emphasizes data-driven microplanning, identification of zero-dose and under-immunized populations, and targeted strategies to reach mobile, hard-to-reach, and cross-border communities. These efforts contribute to global disease prevention and surveillance systems that help reduce the risk of infectious threats spreading across borders.

CGPP works through strong civil society partnerships and embedded engagement with communities, including community health workers and volunteer networks who serve as a critical link between households and government health systems and provide early warning and response to infectious disease threats across communities and borders. CGPP’s presence in neighboring countries helps align regional approaches and cross-border collaboration, ensuring that disease threats do not traverse geographic borders.

CGPP’s Integrated Approach

CGPP applies an integrated, community-based approach that leverages the proven polio eradication platform to advance global health security and improve maternal and child health outcomes. Working in partnership with national governments and local civil society organizations, CGPP strengthens immunization systems, disease surveillance, and essential health services by reinforcing existing structures, rather than creating parallel systems, so countries are better equipped to prevent, detect, and respond to public health threats with cross-border impact.

Through this integrated model, CGPP builds on long-standing polio infrastructure to support early warning and surveillance for vaccine-preventable and priority zoonotic diseases, while simultaneously strengthening routine immunization and malaria prevention. The same trusted community networks used to reach zero-dose and under-immunized children are also mobilized to deliver maternal and child health and nutrition services, ensuring efficiency, reach, and sustainability.

By utilizing the polio platform as a foundation for integrated service delivery, CGPP links community engagement with health system strengthening. This approach improves access to essential services for children and pregnant women, enhances data use for action, and ensures communities remain central to protecting health security while addressing everyday health needs.

The CGPP Secretariat Model of Operation

graphic of secreatariat model with concentric circles starting from communities to international protocols

Several CORE Group member organizations came together to implement the CGPP secretariat model, a time-tested mechanism for increasing collaboration and cooperation. Central to the model and each CGPP country site is an in-country secretariat – a small team of neutral, technical advisors, independent from any single implementing partner. The secretariat teams facilitate communication, coordination, and transparent decision-making among all partners – unifying the community-level expertise of iNGOs and local/national NGOs with the international knowledge and strategies of the GPEI partners. All secretariat teams represent bottom-up community perspectives, update partners, and share data and resources from project implementation areas.

At the community level, the CGPP continually identifies, reviews, and prioritizes community needs and complex realities by registering community concerns and sharing diverse data, lessons learned, and effective practices. As a result, the project drives conversations from the community perspective, ensuring shared learning and accountability, informing decision making to formulate practical strategies, and enabling rapid response and action.