With an ever-growing number of health crises and a shrinking bucket of resources, a central challenge for the global health community is how to sustain momentum on issues that are so often forgotten.
Last year’s U.N. high-level meeting on antimicrobial resistance, or AMR, produced a strong political declaration, but as the spotlight shifts this year to the urgent challenge of noncommunicable diseases, or NCDs, a key question remains: How do we turn these political declarations into real-world change?
Declarations generate headlines and hope, but without long-term financing, country ownership, and mechanisms for accountability, they risk fading into memory as soon as the next crisis emerges.
The global health community must find a way to build the systems that keep momentum alive between declarations, ensuring that critical issues such as AMR and NCDs don’t become “yesterday’s news” and that we’re not asking the same questions all over again by the time the next high-level meeting rolls around.
About the author
Thomas Cserep
Thomas Cserép is an Associate Editor who manages and oversees Devex's social media presence, coordinates Devex’s audience outreach, and produces the This Week in Global Development podcast. Prior to Devex, he worked as a freelance journalist, with his writings appearing in a variety of publications, including Get Spanish Football News and the magazine of the Hungarian Geographic Society.
