Large-scale infectious disease emergencies have disastrous impacts on families, societies, systems, and economies. Major outbreaks in recent years, especially the current COVID-19 outbreak (first identified in Wuhan, China) continued to demonstrate that governments, donors, and aid agencies are critically challenged in their response capacity and coordination, highlighting gaps in the global humanitarian community’s ability to respond to major infectious disease outbreaks. With support from USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, an Inter-Agency Outbreak Preparedness Planning Workshop for COVID-19 was organized in Hanoi on February 20-21. This workshop brought together NGO leaders in humanitarian response and health emergencies with multi-sector representatives and relevant national ministries for facilitated discussions and exercises on NGO operational readiness for major disease outbreak response, focusing on the COVID-19 outbreak.

So What? This workshop improved the preparedness and response capacity of the humanitarian NGO community to better integrate effective and timely approaches to the current COVID-19 outbreak among NGOs, Government of Vietnam, and other partners.