2026 ICAPHE World Directory: Overview
The 2026 ICAPHE World Directory is the first global update of public health education since the WHO’s 1985 publication “World Directory of Schools of Public Health and Postgraduate Training Programmes in Public Health.” It represents the extent and growth of programmes from around the world with the ambition to create a fully searchable online resource, offering a contemporary picture of public health training capacity across the planet.
The Directory forms part of ICAPHE’s broader research agenda which aims to strengthen understanding of global public health education. This includes ongoing work to examine core curricular elements, track emerging trends across regions and institutions and assess programmes against the WHO Essential Public Health Functions Competency Frameworks. Together these strands will support future analyses of education quality and workforce preparedness while helping to identify areas where further development or our work is needed.
Why it matters?
Public health systems rely on an educated and trained workforces, yet training opportunities are unevenly distributed. By mapping where programmes exist, what level they operate at and how they are delivered, the directory helps students, institutions, governments and community stakeholders understand global capacity and identify gaps, strengths, future needs as well as collaboration and mobility opportunities.
This page is intended to orientate the reader to the purpose and scope of the research and the intentions of the new directory, as well as, explain some of the changes in the public health education landscape since the 1980s. Rather than simply updating a printed list of programmes, the introduction presents the ambition of the directory to be a digital resource that reflects the breadth and diversity of public health education today. It guides the reader through the broad conceptual ground covered in the page, including the expansion of the field and terminology across the WHO regions and the global growth of programmes over time. The section attempts to introduce the reader to some of the key findings and analyses that appear in the subsequent web pages.
This page gives the reader a high-level view of the global evidence emerging from our research. Rather than focusing on numerical detail, it aims to provide an executive introduction to the major patterns that have and are shaping public health education worldwide, including differences in access between regions and the uneven distribution of programmes within countries. It also outlines areas, such as, how academic pathways vary internationally and how different modes of delivery are used across systems and some of the wider gaps in global training capacity.
This page examines the origins of our work by outlining the 1985 WHO directory that mapped public health education worldwide. It sets out how the early landscape of schools and departments began to take shape and shows how many of these institutions later grew, merged or shifted their focus. By tracing these developments, the page attempts to establish the historical foundation from which the present research has evolved and explains how the legacy of the original directory continues to guide the wider programme of work today.
Future Developments
The next stage of this work will be the release of a fully searchable global database of public health programmes which will allow users to explore provision by country region level and delivery mode. Alongside this we are continuing the research and verification process to strengthen the accuracy of the dataset as part of the planned academic publications. The directory will also serve as the foundation for wider analysis of trends in public health education worldwide including changes in programme models academic pathways and regional capacity. In addition, it will provide the backdrop for future work on the WHO Essential Public Health Functions competencies which will form an important part of the longer term research agenda.