Your Excellency Ambassador Julien Thöni [turn-ee],
Mr Robert Mardini, Director-General of the Geneva University Hospitals,
IFRC Secretary-General Jagan Chapagain,
Dr Sophia Achab, Professor Alexandra Calmy,
Dear colleagues and friends,
Bonjour à toutes et à tous.
I thank the Geneva University Hospitals and the University of Geneva for inviting me to close this year’s Geneva Health Forum.
And I congratulate all those who received awards this afternoon for their posters and Science Speed Talks.
This year, the Forum marks 20 years – congratulations.
For two decades, it has brought clinicians, researchers, students, communities and policymakers to Geneva, to learn from each other and to test ideas against reality.
There is no better place to do that than here in Geneva, the home of global health.
It was here that Henri Dunant [on-ree doo-no] founded the Red Cross, and here that the first Geneva Convention was signed, in 1864.
It was here, in 1948, that the first World Health Assembly met.
And today, Geneva hosts not only WHO, but the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, Gavi, the Global Fund, UNAIDS, Unitaid and many others – alongside world-class hospitals, universities and research institutes.
Nowhere else on earth can you walk, in one afternoon, from a hospital ward to a laboratory to the room where the world’s health ministers negotiate a treaty.
WHO has called Geneva home since the day we were founded. We are proud to be genevois [zhe-ne-vwah].
I thank the Swiss Confederation, the Canton and the City of Geneva for being such generous hosts, and such reliable partners.
Dear colleagues,
The theme of this Forum, “Rethinking Cooperation in Global Health”, could not be more timely.
Over the past 18 months, the global health system has been shaken.
Sharp and sudden cuts to development assistance have disrupted health services in many countries, and cost health workers their jobs.
But every crisis is an opportunity – in this case, for countries to move away from aid dependency towards health sovereignty, based on domestic resources.
That is the objective of the Accra Reset, which WHO is supporting: to put countries in the driving seat, align partners behind national priorities, and build health systems on a more sustainable domestic foundation.
As you know, WHO was also affected by last year’s funding cuts. Some people have even asked me whether WHO would survive.
Of course, it has not been easy. We had to reduce the size of our budget, and our workforce.
But I have always believed that the biggest threat to WHO is not losing funding, but losing our integrity.
That’s the choice that WHO has faced several times in recent years, and we have always chosen to protect our integrity, and manage the financial consequences.
We have also taken several steps to make WHO more financially sustainable and independent.
As you may know, WHO receives two main types of income: assessed contributions, which are the membership dues countries pay; and voluntary contributions from countries, foundations, philanthropies and others.
Assessed contributions are predictable and flexible. Voluntary contributions are unpredictable, and usually come tightly earmarked for specific projects chosen by donors.
When I began as Director-General in 2017, assessed contributions accounted for just 20% of our base budget, and voluntary contributions accounted for the other 80%.
We saw this imbalance as a major risk to the organization’s stability and independence, if a major donor were to withdraw suddenly.
We proposed a plan, which our Member States approved in 2022, to raise assessed contributions to 50% of the base budget from just 20%, in five instalments over 10 years.
The first two instalments were made in 2023 and 2025, and three more are planned for 2027, 2029 and 2031.
This was not a technical adjustment. It was one of the most important institutional reforms in WHO's history.
It made WHO more sustainable, more independent and more resilient.
And it helped to cushion the impact of last year’s funding cuts, although it could not insulate us fully.
Without the first two increases in assessed contributions, WHO would have lost hundreds more positions than it did.
WHO's authority does not come from money or enforcement powers.
It comes from trust: trust that our advice is based on science and evidence, and that we serve all countries equally, even when that advice is politically inconvenient.
Funding that is predictable and collectively owned by all Member States protects our independence.
That is why we will keep pushing for assessed contributions to reach 50% of the base budget, and why Member States should consider going even further.
Today, WHO has stabilized, and we are moving forward as a leaner organization, more focused on our core mandate.
We are concentrating on the work only WHO can do – setting norms and standards, supporting countries, and protecting the world from health emergencies.
At the same time, WHO is not the only institution that must change. The whole global health architecture needs reform.
The current architecture has saved millions of lives. But mandates overlap. Financing is fragmented and unpredictable. Decisions taken globally do not always reflect national priorities. And countries face multiple plans, processes and reporting requirements.
In May, the World Health Assembly established a one-year, Member State-led and WHO-hosted process to reform the global health architecture.
A Joint Task Force, co-chaired by China and Germany, is now taking this work forward, drawing on the Accra Reset, the Lusaka Agenda, UN80 and other initiatives.
We do not need competing reform agendas. We need these efforts to converge around the needs of countries.
International cooperation should strengthen national capacity, not substitute for it. That is what rethinking cooperation must mean.
At the same time, the threats that global health has faced over the past 18 months are not just issues of finance, structure or mandate.
They run much deeper, to issues of trust in science, and trust in multilateralism.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought both issues to the fore.
Science is the foundation of public health, and of everything WHO does.
But it’s not good enough just to tell people to trust us, or to trust science.
Trust must be earned, and protected.
That’s why we chose to stick with science, and to protect our integrity.
If we compromise on science, we compromise our integrity, and we lose the trust of the countries and people we serve.
We’re pleased that in September this year, the Rockefeller Foundation published a global survey that showed WHO is the most trusted international institution.
That’s very gratifying, but we cannot – and do not – take it for granted.
Trust, once earned, must be protected.
That is why, two days ago, on World Science Day for Peace and Development, WHO launched Together for Science and Health – with a flagship event here at the Geneva Health Forum, and another at the Paris Peace Forum.
Together for Science and Health is a new movement that aims to build trust in science, based on five values: respect, integrity, scientific rigour, ethical responsibility and social inclusion.
It aims to strengthen the connections between science and society, science and policy, and science and communications.
More than 245 organizations have already joined, and I invite the Geneva University Hospitals, the University of Geneva, and every institution represented in this room to join us, if you have not already.
The challenges we face are too big for any of us alone. Cooperation is the only way.
That is the essence of multilateralism. Like the deficit of trust in science, we have also seen an erosion of trust in multilateralism.
We must all be humble enough to understand the reasons for that erosion of trust, and ask ourselves how we can do better.
But there is no question that multilateralism is essential, and that it is alive and well.
For example, not far from here, at the World Health Assembly in May last year, WHO Member States adopted the WHO Pandemic Agreement, a landmark instrument of international law for keeping the world safer from future pandemics.
And as we speak, they are at WHO headquarters negotiating the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing system – the PABS annex – which will help to ensure faster access to pathogens and their genetic sequence information, and fairer access to the vaccines, diagnostics and treatments developed from them.
Although differences remain between countries, they are making progress and I remain confident that they will reach consensus.
Both the Agreement itself and the PABS annex are based on the painful lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the understanding that shared threats demand a shared response.
Dear colleagues,
Cooperation is not a slogan. It is a practice.
You have practised it here for three days – across disciplines, across sectors and across borders.
Geneva gave the world the idea that health and humanity transcend politics. Our task is to keep proving it.
WHO will play its part – leaner, more focused, and still here, in Geneva, where we belong.
Merci beaucoup. I thank you.