Trinity Challenge: Community Surveillance for better control of AMR

A global challenge competition will ask communities in low- and middle-income countries to design their own tools for tracking bacterial infections and antibiotic resistance. This matters because antibiotic resistance is rising fastest in regions with the weakest surveillance systems. Many LMICs lack the laboratory infrastructure, trained staff, and data pipelines to know which bacteria are circulating, which drugs still work, and where resistance is emerging. Without that information, doctors prescribe blindly, resistance spreads undetected, and treatable infections become deadly. The project adapts a proven model: the 2021 Trinity Challenge on pandemic preparedness pulled through eight scalable, community-rooted solutions for the global south. This new challenge would follow the same structure—workshops in LMICs where citizens, local experts, and policymakers co-design the competition questions, then a call for tools that are equitable, relevant, and deployable at national scale. The Wellcome Trust anchors the funding; the Fleming Fund and other partners provide on-the-ground reach. If successful, the challenge could produce surveillance tools that work where labs are scarce—such as phone-based reporting systems, simple diagnostic kits, or community health worker networks—giving LMICs the data they need to target antibiotics, track resistance, and save lives.