G2H2 WORKSHOP: TIME FOR A CURE OF GLOBAL HEALTH
The chilling consequences of having to re-imagine healthier commons
📅 Monday, 26 May 2025 | 10.00–12:00 CEST
📍 Geneva, Cagi, La Pastorale, R.te de Ferney 106 & online
🥐 Light lunch
In the crumbling of the global health set-up – as we have known it for decades – there are several dire implications. Trump’s executive orders to drastically cut the US international health cooperation, coupled with the foreign aid restrictions by several European governments, entail lives lost, jobs lost, social protection for millions people and their families lost. It is a tragedy of our times.
An obscene tragedy that compels us all to engage in a profound rethinking of global health and its endless agenda of ineffectual aid, based on the bad conscience and the narcissistic charity of donors – the former colonial masters.
After decades of lofty promises, mixed successes, catastrophic failures and billions of dollars spent, the current geopolitical crisis paves the way for fundamentally changing consolidated assumptions and constructs around global health. After decades of health technical solutionism, time is ripe for addressing power imbalances and structural disfunctions deriving from deleterious foreign aid strategies that have not served the right to health. Instead, they have favored the increasing role of private interests in the health agenda, and the progressive privatization, corporatization and financialization of health rights.
As we seek pathways in this puzzle, we want to encourage members of civil society organizations to assess the interstices that may surface and to ponder the consequences of new scenarios for global health that must be global PUBLIC health, no longer determined by the extractive capacities of few industrial and philanthropic oligopolies, but by democratic and participatory policy-making trajectories in countries, and regions. Respecting their sense of destination. Re-establishing international cooperation and trust. Restoring health as a positive notion that includes prevention and wellbeing, in the interconnectedness with ecological ecosystems.
Speakers
- Unni Karanukara, Senior Fellow, Yale University Global Health Justice Partnership and former director of the UN University International Institute for Global Health
- Angela Kasulle Nabwowe, Initiative for Social and Economic Rights (ISER) Uganda
- Lauren Paremoer, Associate Professor of Political Studies at the University of Cape Town, and Steering Council Representative for People’s Health Movement (PHM)‘s Democratising Global Health Governance Programme
The workshop was followed by the G2H2 Annual General Meeting (13.30 – 16.30 CEST – online).
