Building partnerships for public health
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The collaboration and support of the global community is vital to the World Health Organization fulfilling its mission to promote health, keep the world safe and serve the vulnerable. Sustained commitment and more resources devoted to strengthening partnerships increase the potential for impact both in ways of working and in raising voluntary contributions.
Maintaining strong partnerships underpins all of WHO’s core functions. With the Transformation agenda, WHO set out to deepen existing relationships and nurture new innovative partnerships.
Over the years, WHO has engaged with a broad scope of partners in various capacities across all three levels of the Organization. But these engagements were often fragmented across the Organization and lacked coherence and continuity. As part of the Transformation, a more cohesive and long-term approach has been formed, developing engagement strategies which encompass youth, civil society, parliaments and the private sector.
An important part of the WHO Transformation Agenda process has been the ability to embrace opportunities and develop initiatives catalysed by other stakeholders. Initiated during the COVID-19 pandemic, dialogues with civil society started as a forum to share potential solutions to the crisis. They have since evolved to cover effective collaboration on a broad range of technical issues. It was during one of these dialogues that the civil society groups proposed the creation of a Civil Society Commission to directly advise the Director-General and senior management on relevant issues. The Commission was launched in August 2023, with a goal to strengthen dialogue, foster collaboration and provide recommendations to support WHO on its engagement with civil society at all levels, with a particular focus on the country level.
Young people need to have an active voice in creating health policies and designing healthy environments.
The Commission has more than 30 members, with a steering committee of up to 25 members who meet monthly to set the strategic agenda and deliverables to bring to the Annual General Meeting. There are also working groups tackling specific issues, such as the group tasked with providing feedback on key WHO documents being developed including WHO’s Fourteenth General Programme of Work (GPW 14). WHO also coordinated targeted consultations on GPW 14 in the lead up to the Seventy-seventh World Health Assembly with both civil society and youth.
Important progress has been made on engagement with youth, including through the WHO Youth Council formed in 2023. The Council builds on engagement around education which has been established for many years, and provides a new, dynamic space to share the priorities and experiences of young people. By amplifying their voices, the Council has created an avenue for the concerns of young people to be more meaningfully and systematically incorporated into WHO’s work.
The WHO Youth Council is complemented by other initiatives such as the WHO Youth Delegate Programme, which works with Member States to encourage them to include young delegates when attending major conferences and meetings. in addition, the Global Model WHO is a three-day in-person meeting planned for October 2024 which targets 350 high-school and university students to negotiate in student-led public health simulations. The simulations from this event will be shared with Member States to give them insight into young people’s concerns and ideas on important health topics.
Alongside these key partner engagement initiatives, WHO has fostered corporate partnerships with tech companies to provide credible health-related information to the public and fight misinformation. The Organization also works with sporting bodies through the WHO Sport for Health Programme. Engagement with parliaments has also been strengthened, with a dedicated WHO focal point working to help position health at the core of the parliamentary agenda.
While each of these initiatives has contributed to more open and collaborative approaches to partnerships within WHO, this work still needs to be mainstreamed across the Organization. Many of the initiatives have been well received by technical departments; however, a lack of funding and resources prevents them from realizing their full potential. Adequate resourcing, complemented by cohesive, inclusive engagement strategies and more established ownership across the three levels of the Organization, would allow WHO to broaden and strengthen partnerships.