A report card for preparedness

We created the ReadyScore, to determine whether a country is prepared to find, stop, and prevent epidemics. Visit PreventEpidemics.org to see each country's score and find tools to help you impove your country's score.

JEE WHO's Joint External Evaluation (JEE)

The score uses data from the World Health Organization’s Joint External Evaluation. Like a report card, there are 19 areas of preparedness and response capacity that are scored, first by a group of national experts of the country and then by an external group of international experts. The ReadyScore is the average score of the 19 preparedness areas.

The assessment is critical because it provides a snapshot of each country's capability in important areas required to control outbreaks. This includes things like having adequate labs to diagnose diseases, surveillance systems to detect when diseases spread, emergency response operations to effectively coordinate a response, and a trained workforce to implement control measures. The assessment shows gaps in these capacities and helps prioritize where to invest time and money to improve readiness.

Five levels

Better Prepared (over 80%)

Country has a robust system to find, stop and prevent health threats. Should an outbreak start to spread, they should be able to find and stop it quickly to minimize the impact on human health, but they must remain vigilant.

Work to Do (40-80%)

Country has assessed their ability to find, stop and prevent health threats. The results show they have some functioning systems in place should an outbreak start to spread. However, there is room for improvement and lives could be lost if a new health threat emerges.

Not Ready (under 40%)

Country has assessed their ability to find, stop and prevent health threats and identified significant gaps. They are committed to improving epidemic preparedness, but an outbreak today could cause numerous deaths and spread to neighboring countries and the world.

In Progress

Country has began the external evaluation process but no data is available at this time. There is not a robust way of knowing whether this country is prepared for an epidemic, but there will be in the near future.


Country has not volunteered to have an external, transparent evaluation of their ability to find, stop and prevent health threats. Without this robust assessment we cannot be certain they are ready prevent epidemics.

What we're doing

We work with countries to step up their preparedness so they can make incremental, measurable progress toward sustainable health systems that protect their citizens from disease.

Resolve to Save Lives is committed to making the world safer from epidemics. Our team provides technical assistance to at-risk countries directly or through partners, mobilizes resources to support priority actions, and catalyzes political will to address preparedness gaps. We help countries "Step Up" by making incremental changes that get them from red to yellow and yellow to green. Our support focuses on working with countries to "Step Up" in critical areas assessed by the JEE.

Closing preparedness gaps

The ReadyScore helps identify preparedness gaps and we can help you close them. These areas include monitoring systems that can spot unusual health reports from local clinics, or trained disease detectives who can rapidly deploy when a new health threat is reported.

We focus on four of the critical areas that need to be improved in order to be ready for an epidemic, including include the laboratory system to diagnose diseases and confirm outbreaks; surveillance system to detect outbreaks; emergency response system to stop outbreaks; and the workforce to keep communities safe from outbreaks. We also identify a few of the lower scoring preparedness areas that could use improvement and support country efforts for improvement.


ReadyScore Fact Sheet What can be done to prevent epidemics? Press Release for PreventEpidemics.org