The Global Programme on Health Promotion Effectiveness (GPHPE): a bold concept with few resources.

This paper describes the past ten years of the International Union for Health Promotion and Education's (IUHPE) flagship programme on health promotion effectiveness. It examines the context in which the programme developed and the organization of the programme to carry out its goals. The paper takes a critical look at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and difficulties of conducting such a broad programme within a global membership-based non-governmental organization (NGO). It also discusses how the field of evidence gathering has developed in relationship to the project and what changes have emerged since the early years. Lack of resources, both in terms of contributors and financial support, is identified as the key problem in sustaining an NGO effort to examine effectiveness.