G2H2 Annual Report 2025

 

Dear Members and Friends

We are living through perilous times, with severe consequences for global health. Flames from geopolitical tensions and a deepening global cost-of-living crisis have thrown millions of people across the globe into dire straits, undermining their health and wellbeing. Welfare has largely been supplanted by warfare.

The rules-based multilateral system is now little more than a façade behind which powerful countries, particularly the United States of America, under the reign of Mr Donald Trump, do as they please. It is poor people, especially so in the Global South, that bear the brunt. The fires of racism, xenophobia, mobilization of ethnic identities and male chauvinism are being stoked by right-wing forces presenting these as false solutions.

Never in recent history has the need for global health activists to stand up and speak truth to power been so great. We must say, enough is enough. This does not have to be the situation we live in. The world can be a better place, based on love, solidarity and hope. Health for all can be achieved with fundamental social and economic changes to put people and the planet at the heart of policy-formulation and an unwavering reform of the global governance structure to enable this.

Health workers have increasingly become targets in conflict zones. Health facilities and schools have been bombarded with missiles. Women and children have been intentionally killed with impunity. Millions more starve or live in abject poverty.

World leaders spend $2.7 trillion annually on weapons and ammunition, while all that is needed to end poverty is $300 billion annually. The wealth of corporations and the billionaire class comes before the health and wellbeing of the people and the planet. Waging wars where people are being killed is more attractive to them than waging war on poverty and want.

Another war that world leaders appear to be less concerned about despite the painful lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, barely half a decade back, is the war of humankind against microbes. The ongoing negotiations on Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) at the open-ended Intergovernmental Working Group (IGWG) on the Pandemic underscores a business-as-usual approach. Governments of countries in the Global North continue to advance positions that run against the grain of equity which the majority of Member States stand for. It is crucial to have a PABS annex that can help ensure pandemic prevention, preparedness and response in the most robust way possible. We as G2H2 and allies have continued to be a voice of conscience within the IGWG and we are optimistic that the continued push for equity within the body will be fruitful.

We must decolonise global health. The IGWG is a key theatre of efforts to do this. There is also the need to build on the foundations of the WHO Code of Practice on International migration of health workers. Bilateral Labour Migration Agreements (BLMAs) where they exist are opaque. This has to change. The Global South is bleeding in terms of much-needed health workers while the Global North saves tens of billions of dollars every year through international recruitment instead of training locally.

We must de-patriarchalize global health, too. The predominant biomedical view of health is distant from the feminist economy of care that focuses on the intersectional drivers of disease and embraces transformative solutions – not quick fix solutions built on monopoly rights.

The WHO is going through a challenging moment. All Member States need to walk their talk of breathing new life into it, in light of the exit of the United States. Nonetheless, the WHO needs to be bolder in calling out corporate interests in health, and in stopping the suprematist effort to revive misogynism on a global scale by denying all women’s rights.

G2H2 and its member organisations remain committed to the struggle for health for all and for a better world. We are indeed living in troubling times. But we also know that the darkest hour is often the hour before dawn. A better day will come for global health and humankind, if we do not surrender today.

 

Bàbá Ayé and Nicoletta Dentico
G2H2 Co-Presidents, May 2026