Opinion: At this week’s AU Summit, Africa faces a choice: Continue with preventable maternal and child deaths and structural barriers to women’s and girls’ well-being, or make the investments needed to build resilient health systems.
Africa’s health systems are being forced into a rapid reset as donor funding declines. Governments are raising taxes, borrowing, and cutting services to cope — moves that risk pushing more health care costs onto patients.
The World Health Organization director-general elections are taking place in 2027, but expect candidates to come forward this year in the lead-up to the World Health Assembly. Whoever takes up the mantle at the agency will have their work cut out for them.
Ghana’s President John Mahama has unveiled a global secretariat, a high-level health reform panel, and a coalition of political heavyweights backing a push to reduce aid dependence.
When the U.S. joined in 1948, Congress stipulated the country must pay what’s owed to the agency before it can withdraw — but the Trump administration says it's out and won't pay anything more.
Paying what’s owed to the organization is one of the conditions of its withdrawal.
That's what Bill Gates and Peter Sands said during a conversation at the World Economic Forum.
During this Devex Pro Briefing, Gavi CEO Sania Nishtar said the organization's reform was designed in the context of the needed changes in the global health architecture.
U.S. lawmakers released a foreign assistance appropriations bill that allocates $9.4 billion for global health.
Six months ago the Trump administration said it would cut funding for Gavi but the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives included funding for it in its foreign assistance appropriations bill.
Staff cuts, loss of expertise, shuttered programs, and the withdrawal from the World Health Organization are worrying those who’ve invested deeply in the agency's decades-long work in global health.