Photo: Vyacheslav Argenberg / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
Public health surveillance systems do not stop at borders — but until now, the data they generate has. Georgia and Armenia have taken a first step toward changing that, formalising a bilateral technical cooperation agreement to share communicable disease surveillance data for cross-border migrant populations.
- First bilateral health surveillance agreement in South Caucasus
- Covers Sadakhlo-Bagratashen corridor — a major daily migration route
- 24-hour outbreak notification protocol
- Fully operational Q1 2027 — Azerbaijan invited as third partner
The agreement, signed at Ministry of Health level in both countries, covers three operational elements: weekly sharing of syndromic surveillance data from facilities near the Sadakhlo-Bagratashen crossing corridor, notification within 24 hours of confirmed outbreaks affecting migrant worker populations in either country, and a joint epidemiological investigation protocol activated when a cross-border health event is identified.
The Sadakhlo-Bagratashen corridor is one of the South Caucasus’s most active migration routes. Seasonal agricultural workers, traders working both sides of the market, and long-term labour migrants move through it daily. Before this agreement, the health of this population was tracked by two entirely separate surveillance systems with no mechanism for alert, data comparison or joint response.
A dedicated data exchange mechanism — using WHO’s EVIPNet platform as the technical backbone — will be fully operational by the first quarter of 2027. Both countries’ national public health institutes will have real-time access to aggregated (non-identifiable) alert data from the other side of the border.
The Public Health Institute of Georgia contributed the technical framework for the agreement, drawing on its cross-border health methodology developed under the WHO Special Initiative on Health and Migration. PHIG will also provide training to staff at both the National Centre for Disease Control in Tbilisi and the National Institute of Health in Yerevan.
Azerbaijan has been formally invited to join as a third partner, which would extend the surveillance network to the full South Caucasus region. Discussions are at an early stage but both Georgian and Armenian counterparts are supportive.
Source: PHIG / Georgian Ministry of Health, August 2026.
Professor, David Tvildiani Medical University | Chair, Public Health Institute of Georgia | Founder, Accréditation Sans Frontières
