Public Health
An overlooked way to close Africa’s health gaps
17 Rooms is an innovative approach to tackling the interconnected economic, social, and environmental challenges of sustainable development, articulated by all countries in 2015 as 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Co-organized by the Brookings Institution and The Rockefeller Foundation since 2018, 17 Rooms offers ways to bring people together and inspire new forms of cooperative insight and action within and across goals.
17 Rooms flagship
In 2026, the 17 Rooms flagship will focus on advancing “innovations in the how,” new approaches to implementation and collaboration that can generate new forms of progress on widespread challenges facing people and planet. For each innovation, this entails a rapid series of virtual working group (“Room”) sessions to collaboratively vet, refine, and advance a proposition.
Room outputs include memos and commentaries on the Brookings and The Rockefeller Foundation websites.
17 Rooms-X
17 Rooms-X offers a structured yet flexible process for communities to identify priorities, foster collaboration, and turn shared insights into coordinated local action toward the SDGs. Over 70 communities across more than two dozen countries have experimented with the approach in a range of contexts, including municipalities, universities, schools, community foundations, generosity networks, and a multicountry effort across Latin America.
17 Rooms-X brings community members together in “Rooms,” typically one per SDG, where participants collaborate to identify actions they can implement over the next 12-18 months. Sharing emerging ideas across Rooms then uncovers opportunities for collaboration. The dynamic process offers an efficient way of convening natural allies, ideally promoting enough familiarity to enable collaboration and enough diversity to spark new ideas and paths to action.
What does 17 Rooms offer?
- An innovative approach to shared problem-solving. Each Room has the potential to surface or strengthen how progress happens—methods, models, and tools that can unlock meaningful advances across multiple dimensions of sustainable development.
- Concrete actions. Room outputs emphasize cross-cutting “how” solutions—tools, methods, and models that improve implementation, coordination, incentives, and governance across contexts—and, where appropriate, help mobilize partnerships or new entities to sustain follow-through.
- Novel insights. When participants tackling common problems share their perspectives from diverse viewpoints, organizations, and sectors, unique forms of group learning and inspiration can emerge, both within and across Rooms.
- Conversations over presentations. Discussions are structured around collaboration and peer-learning, aiming to focus on what’s best for an issue, not for any individual organization.
- Pragmatic communities. A common quest for action, rooted in a blend of perspectives, can foster a shared sense of energy and opportunity.
Latest from 17 Rooms
Sustainable Development Goals
Bridging Africa’s health financing gap: The case for remittance-based insurance
Sustainable Development Goals
A home genome project: How a city learning cohort can create AI systems for optimizing housing supply
Government Reform
Building state and local government innovation capacity: Investing in university-government innovation partnerships