G2H2 Annual Report 2024
Dear Members and Friends
Wars, inflation, extreme poverty, and spiralling inequality ravaged the world during the hottest year on record, exceeding the 1.5°C global heating threshold. The multiple crises humankind has faced since the COVID-19 pandemic deepened in 2024, with dreadful consequences for public health and social progress. Far-right parties and nationalistic forces latched on to this, stirring up fear and hate, with ideas that divide us, which are false solutions. The number of people killed in armed conflicts across the world increased from 179,099 in the preceding year to 233,597 in 2024, as recorded by the Armed Conflict and Event Data. A significant number of these were women and children, including in Palestine where — in 2024 — they accounted for 70% of the estimated 35,000 deaths in Gaza and the West Bank.
Hunger and starvation have been the lot of a vast number of people. COVID-19 years to 2024 saw a rise of up to 153 million in the number of people experiencing hunger. 883 million people lived with hunger, and about 1.33 million people suffered famine or famine-like conditions in the year. This is although the world produces more food than required to feed all of its 8 billion people. The burden of hunger is not evenly borne. The hunger level in 36 countries was ranked serious in the 2024 Global Hunger Index, and alarming in six. Five of these are in Africa: Burundi, Chad, Madagascar, Somalia and South Sudan. The sixth is Yemen in the Middle East. In these countries, the very right to life has become near meaningless, not to talk of the right to health. But this does not have to be the fate of our world. The Oxfam Inequality report documents how corporate power is at the heart of increasing social inequality and global division.While five billion people became poorer across the world between 2000and 2024, the five richest men of the world doubled their wealth. Some 2,781 billionaires own US$14.2 trillion, while 700 million people live in extreme poverty. The intrusive interests of these rich few — through their corporations and related philanthropies — and geopolitical considerations appeared to have weighed heavier in the hearts of wealthier countries, while negotiating the pandemic agreement.
Discussions on pandemics and public global health financing continue to ignore economic justice, despite all efforts by many countries from the global South to include it. This approach which undermines the spirit of international cooperation and that solidarity that is supposed to underpin multilateralism is being reinforced with the expanding influence of right wing parties and their governments. The same parties and governments that keep orchestrating their phantasmagoric pushback on women’s bodies and rights. Their patriarchal attacks on the reality of genders threaten to dismantle language that has been negotiated and agreed in the past. More seriously, their organized misogyny stands out as a renewed peril to the lives, freedom and agency of all women in the world. They must be stopped.
The situation that health activists and progressive forces faced in 2024 was quite dire. And with the re-election of Donald Trump as President of the United States of America in November, the terrible global situation became all set to get worse. But we must not lose hope. Now more than ever, we must be clear with our arguments and boldly put them forward.
This spirit informed some of our activities in 2024, such as the symposium on a World in Flames in May and a workshop on Reclaiming the United Nations in October, which we speak more about in the report. The current spate of multidimensional crises in the world is not sustainable. The climate emergency is a ticking time bomb. And health for all is not achievable without planetary and economic justice.
Last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly’s adoption of the “Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order.” And we recall, from the Alma Ata Declaration, that “Economic and social development, based on a New International Economic Order, is of basic importance to the attainment of health for all and to the reduction of the gap between the health status of the developing and developed countries.” The struggle for health for all has always been a struggle to change the world, prioritising people over profit and justice over geopolitics. And it is a struggle that is more pressing to wage now than ever, if we are to salvage a future for humankind, and the world.
Bàbá Ayé and Nicoletta Dentico
G2H2 Co-Presidents, May 2025