Preventing noncommunicable diseases by addressing risks and determinants

Supporting research to prevent premature death and disability from NCDs, focusing on primary prevention, commercial determinants, and fiscal measures like health taxes to advance health equity.

Overview

To prevent premature death and disability from noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), health systems must look beyond clinical care to address the underlying drivers of ill health. The Alliance supports research and learning that focus on the social, commercial and economic determinants of NCDs.

This area of work focuses explicitly on primary prevention of noncommunicable diseases rather than how health systems organize care and treatment pathways. The Alliance generates policy-relevant evidence on multisectoral prevention strategies, such as health taxes, and supports community-led research to challenge the structural inequities that shape NCD risk.

Systems framing

The Alliance approaches NCD prevention not primarily as a behavioural or biomedical challenge, but as a governance and political one. Work in this area reframes prevention by examining the political economy of policy-making and the power dynamics embedded in how evidence is generated and used.

This systems-level approach focuses on:

• The political economy of health – moving beyond narrow economic modelling to analyse the political, institutional and social forces that enable or constrain fiscal and regulatory policies, including how policies are framed to build public trust and legitimacy;
• Commercial and social determinants of health – addressing the commercial drivers of ill health alongside the social conditions that shape exposure and vulnerability, recognizing that effective prevention requires coordinated, multisectoral action to regulate harmful products, reduce inequities and strengthen community-led responses; and
• Epistemic justice – challenging extractive research models by strengthening approaches that value diverse ways of knowing, shift power in evidence generation and enable communities to define their own health priorities and solutions.

How the Alliance approaches this area

The Alliance’s strategy for 2024–2028 prioritizes the prevention of NCDs across three interrelated dimensions, recently expanded to include a stronger focus on community-led knowledge: