Our story

FairChoices was conceived in 2010 at a hostel in the Piassa neighborhood of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where professors Kjell Arne Johansson and Ole Frithjof Norheim from University of Bergen (UiB) were discussing priority setting in resource constrained settings. The day after, they developed an Excel file that calculated the health benefits gained from interventions, but they quickly saw the need for a more comprehensive and powerful tool that could assess health care interventions according to multiple criteria.

In 2012, statistician and R-programmer Øystein A. Haaland started his tenure as a postdoctoral fellow and almost immediately started collaborating with Johansson. Still, it was not until 2014 that the first lines of FairChoices code were written. Since 2016, Jan-Magnus Økland has been the lead programmer, although it was not until the establishment of Bergen Centre for Ethics and Priority Setting in Health (BCEPS) at UiB in 2019 that he has been able to fully focus on FairChoices on a permanent full-time basis. The establishment of BCEPS, made possible by generous contributions from the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), the Trond Mohn Foundation, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, also led to the hiring of more technical staff and the recruitment of new students at both master and PhD level.

Currently, the FairChoices group is headed by Johansson and Haaland at BCEPS/UiB, in collaboration with David Watkins and his team at the University of Washington, Gene Bukhman and his team at the Center for Integration Science in Global Health Equity, and Stéphane Verguet and his team at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Together, they lead a team of enthusiastic contributors and employees across three universities and multiple countries across four continents. FairChoices also partners with the Africa Center for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, as well as the ministries of health in Ethiopia, Zanzibar, Malawi, Ghana, Nepal, Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, and The Gambia.