On April 21, 2026, two leading Caribbean health and academic institutions — the Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA) and St George’s University (SGU) — formalized a transformative five-year strategic partnership via a signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), designed to strengthen regional public health systems across the Caribbean bloc through integrated research, specialized training, and data-backed policy development.
This new agreement builds on decades of informal collaboration between the two organizations to create a structured framework for addressing the Caribbean’s most pressing public health priorities. Key focus areas of the partnership range from tackling rising rates of communicable and noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) to mitigating the public health impacts of environmental change, with targeted work planned across seven core domains. These include co-developing public health research and generating actionable evidence, expanding hands-on student training and public health workforce development, building specialized capacity in epidemiology, public health practice and data analytics, advancing digital innovation to strengthen regional health infrastructure, facilitating standardized data analysis and cross-institutional knowledge sharing, advancing integrated One Health initiatives including laboratory and technical cooperation, and jointly executing the 71st Annual Health Research Conference.
At the official signing ceremony, Dr. Lisa Indar, Executive Director of CARPHA, emphasized that the new MoU codifies a long-standing, productive working relationship between the two institutions. “This agreement solidifies what we have already built over years of collaboration, and it will position both CARPHA and SGU as central regional leaders in public health research and practice across the Caribbean,” Indar explained. She added that the partnership will streamline the process of translating groundbreaking research findings into evidence-based policy recommendations for CARPHA’s member states, and serves as a model for innovative collaborative approaches to addressing shared regional public health challenges.
Speaking on behalf of SGU, Professor Marios Loukas, President and Dean of the university’s School of Medicine, framed the partnership as a defining milestone for Caribbean public health. By combining SGU’s robust academic and research capabilities with CARPHA’s established regional public health leadership, the institutions will build a unified, cross-sector platform to accelerate innovation, expand regional research capacity, and speed the conversion of research evidence into tangible policy and on-the-ground practice. “This collaboration paves the way for a more resilient, equitable, and healthier Caribbean, and positions the region as a global leader in innovative public health action,” Loukas noted.
The formal partnership is the outcome of more than a decade of incremental collaboration between the two organizations. For years, SGU has placed its students in internship placements at CARPHA, giving emerging public health professionals hands-on experience working on regional initiatives while contributing valuable support to CARPHA’s work across the bloc. SGU faculty have also partnered with CARPHA researchers on joint studies and represented the region in key stakeholder networks. One of the most high-profile past collaborations came in 2015, when SGU hosted CARPHA’s Annual Health Research Conference on its Grenada campus, demonstrating the university’s long-standing commitment to advancing regional health research agendas.