The Strategic Tool for Assessing Risks (STAR), launched in November 2021, offers a comprehensive, easy-to-use toolkit and approach to facilitate national and subnational evidence-based assessments of public health risks for planning and prioritization of health emergency preparedness and disaster risk management strengthening. The STAR tool, which builds upon 75 in-country workshops conducted since 2016, supports countries to meet one of the core requirements under IHR (2005) for risk assessment. It also facilitates progress toward national disaster risk reduction in line with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.

The STAR tool has been conceptually designed so it can be adapted to national contexts as needed, and so that it can be used to focus on a subset of hazards based on country priorities. Accordingly, the STAR methodology at the request of the government, was adapted to concentrate on strategically assessing the infectious hazards within the country.

The STAR workshop in Bangladesh was the first in the country and resulted in the development of a country risk profile and the prioritization of key actions to enhance prevention and mitigation of identified risks. Held across 5-days in May 2021 - with support from Bangladesh’s Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research (IEDCR) and Influenza Centre, and WHO, the workshop brought together epidemiologists and government representatives from the animal health sector, points of entry, aviation, animal husbandry, disaster management, climate change, communications, socioeconomics, academia, military as well as partners from World Bank virtually to map infectious hazards with pandemic potential.

The results of the STAR workshop are expected to support national risk-based health emergency planning and continued prioritization of risk-informed actions to better prevent, mitigate, detect early, prepare for, be ready for, respond to, and recover from a health emergency.

Bangladesh is the first country within the South-East Asian Region to conduct the STAR exercise.

Additional STAR workshops are planned in multiple countries throughout 2022.