Globally, 25 million deaths occur each year from conditions that require oxygen, including pneumonia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Shockingly, less than half of health facilities in low- and middle-income countries have regular access to oxygen. As a result of this gap, fewer than 1 in 5 children with sever pneumonia receive oxygen.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused widespread oxygen shortages across Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Less than half of hospitalized patients who died from COVID-19 had oxygen support.

As part of the pandemic response, the Access to Covid Tools Accelerator (ACT-A) partnership, launched by the WHO, established the ACT-A Oxygen Emergency Taskforce in February 2021 to coordinate and advocate for increased access to oxygen supplies. The Taskforce, co-led by Unitaid and The Wellcome Trust, made significant progress in securing oxygen access for LMICs, including raising over US$ 1 billion ($600m through The Global Fund) to support procurement and delivery of oxygen systems, market shaping to improve oxygen affordability and accelerated supplies and technical cooperation on the development, and financing and implementation of national oxygen response plans.

As the world transitions from the acute phase of the pandemic and prepares for future threats, the ACT-A-Oxygen Emergency Taskforce evolved into the Global Oxygen Alliance (GO2AL). With this transition, GO2AL aims to convert the investments made during the pandemic into lives saved and to continue the critical work of the previous Taskforce, including financing to expand production, lowering the price of oxygen and providing technical support to governments.

While the GO2AL partners are committed to addressing this issue, as of mid-2023 they had no guiding medium-term strategy to guide their work.