With a mission to catalyze, complement, and connect, the HEPR Program provides financing to jump-start critical and innovative work so countries, territories, and regional efforts can spur innovation, build cohesive systems capacity within and across borders, and attract other funding.

The HEPR Program is specifically designed to:

• Build cohesive systems capacity for countries and regional efforts to work seamlessly together for resilient essential health services and health emergencies;
   
• Coalesce, connect, collaborate and coordinate across sectors to ensure that countries invest in preparedness-specific and preparedness supportive functions that can be deployed to prevent, detect and respond to health emergencies;
   
• Support at-risk countries and territories not eligible for other types of World Bank financing; and
   
• Complement and coordinate its work with other relevant financing mechanisms across the World Bank including operations financing through the International Development Association for the poorest countries and COVID-19-specific mechanisms, as well as key trust funds such as the Policy and Human Resource Development trust fund, the Global Facility Disaster Reduction and Recovery, and the Pandemic Fund.