Who Gets to Hold the Pen? A4HP's Week at the World Health Assembly
Every May, Geneva becomes the centre of the global health calendar. Ministers, technical experts, and civil society organisations convene at the Palais des Nations for the World Health Assembly, the World Health Organization’s most influential gathering of the year. This year, WHA79 brought together delegations from over 190 Member States under the theme “Reshaping Global Health: A Shared Responsibility,” with agenda items ranging from pandemic preparedness to the financing of health systems.
Whilst the pertinence of the meeting remains unopposed, there lies a quieter question that requires candid evaluation; when global health gets reshaped, who actually holds the pen? For the Alliance, this question is not rhetorical; rather it is a fundamental prerogative that calls to light the mechanism leading to global health governance. It can be inferred from their relentless efforts that communities and the organisations that stand alongside us are not a mere ceremonial addition but a significant contributor to the success of administration. It has been an age-oldstruggle to bridge the gap between the Public and Private realities of the civilians. Their focus thus gets shifted towards eliminating/ minimizing the gap between what is decided in a conference room and the en masse experience in a clinic or a neighborhood. Over the course of the week, the Alliance’s primary goal was to enumerate and further illustrate what it would mean to close that distance.
Convening and Speaking on the Record
The week opened on Sunday with "From Dialogue to Action”, a session cohosted by the Alliance held at the Hotel InterContinental. The session facilitated a forum for people who rarely sit at the same table. It promoted a collaborative platform wherein WHO officials, faith-based health networks, technologists, and academic researchers dedicated their time to work through a single uncomfortable question: ‘why does civil society so often show up fragmented, competing for visibility instead of building shared ground?’
The discussion came back to trust, which several speakers described as the foundation of effective community response. The most effective responses are not improvised during a crisis; they rely on relationships built in advance. One panelist pointed to the Ebola response as an example, noting that trusted community health workers were able to support early care-seeking and safer burial practices because they already had established relationships with local communities. Where those relationships were weaker, response efforts had to build trust while also managing the emergency itself.
Six days later, the Alliance drew up the curtains by cohosting a very different conversation at the WHO headquarters. The discussion, "Securing the Future," confronted a slower-moving emergency: ‘the quiet collapse of the pipeline for new antibiotics.’ It made the case that antimicrobials should be treated less as commercial products and more as public goods. The capacity to develop them, the session argued, should be built into the countries carrying the heaviest burden of infection, rather than added on after the fact.
Between those two sessions, the Alliance spoke on the floor of the Assembly itself. Founding board member Gabriella Sozanski delivered a formal statement under the agenda item on wellbeing and health promotion, pressing member states to weave health promotion through their policies and to treat community participation as something meaningful, not ceremonial. The Alliance also added its name to a joint statement on the economics of health for all, a pointed reminder that in a moment of tightening budgets, spending on prevention is not a luxury to defer to next year.
Four Priorities Tested Against a Week
The Alliance organises its work around four priorities, from climate and humanitarian health to the sharper edges of digital innovation. WHA79 offered a genuine test of each, not just in the two events the Alliance cohosted, but across more than thirty sessions the Alliance tracked throughout International Geneva.
Climate and humanitarian health: The Alliance followed sessions on fossil fuels and human rights, powering up climate action, climate change and cities, the climate crisis and the right to health, health in a world of crises and impunity, as well as refugee and migrant health. At the fossil fuels session, speakers reframed the energy transition not as an environmental matter but as a question of life and law, pointing to the International Court of Justice's recent advisory opinion on state obligations. At the cities session, the argument was blunt: the places where most people now live remain almost entirely absent from the rooms where health and climate policy actually get written. Across the rest, a consistent thread emerged: climate change is a health emergency now, not a future one, and the humanitarian system built to respond to it needs structural reform rather than incremental fixes. The Alliance has worked on this for years. It helped launch the WHO civil society working group on climate and health at the 71st Assembly and has treated planetary health as a core determinant of community wellbeing ever since.
Noncommunicable diseases and mental wellbeing: These conditions account for roughly three-quarters of deaths worldwide, and the Alliance tracked sessions across the space: Align T1D's country-led model for type 1 diabetes (T1D), the European Association for the Study of the Liver's (EASL) work connecting metabolic health to NCD prevention, the case for wellbeing societies, and the economics of healthy ageing. A session convened by liver disease specialists made the point clearly, political commitments change nothing until someone implements them, and the commercial forces shaping diet and behaviour need regulation, not encouragement. The Alliance also had direct representation on a panel. Mr Lawrence Gostin represented the Alliance at “Feeding the World While Curbing Antimicrobial Resistance”, a session that pushed antimicrobial resistance beyond a narrow medical framing and into the wider ‘One Health’ conversation connecting agriculture, food systems, and human health. It was one of several moments that showed the Alliance was not only attending the week but actively shaping it.
Digital health and applied innovation: The Alliance own cohosted session on antimicrobial resistance doubled as a statement of principle: innovation left entirely to market forces tends to reach the people who need it least. The Alliance also tracked sessions on artificial intelligence and universal health coverage, watching closely for where digital tools were framed as extending care rather than replacing the judgment of health workers, and where the consensus held that a human has to remain in the loop. This builds on the Alliance’s fourteenth Global Forum at WHO headquarters in late 2024, which drew more than a thousand participants on its opening day.
Community health and local knowledge: This priority is closest to the Alliance’s founding idea, and it was where its presence was deepest. Alongside From Dialogue to Action session, the Alliance attended a listening session with the NGO Committee on Health, joined discussions on partnerships supporting international solidarity in Geneva, followed the ‘Built Together, Fit for All’ conversation on global health architecture reform, tracked the SAGER@10 campaign marking ten years of the SAGER Guidelines on sex and gender equity in research, and sat in on a session rethinking the social determinants of health. The reform discussion produced one of WHA79’s most striking figures: 73 percent of civil society respondents said they were ready to take part in reform, yet only 9 percent ever had. That gap between willingness and access is exactly the gap the Allianceexists to close. Its research with WHO’s Health Promotion Unit shows that folding local knowledge into health programmes helps them reach further and last longer. This is a finding carried into workshops from Kitale, Kenya to Bangalore, India and reinforced this year through partner meetings with the International Federation of Medical Student’s Associations (IFMSA), the Association québécoise de prévention de la santé (ASPQ), and the International Union for Health Promotion and Education (IUHPE).
What Stayed and What Comes Next
The week left behind a few clear lessons that still hold true. Trust cannot be built in the middle of a crisis; it must be in place beforehand. Prevention only matters when it moves from evidence into action. WHA79 repeatedly showed that health is shaped as much by social and commercial determinants as by clinical services, and that progress depends on including the communities whose lives policies are supposed to change. If those voices are excluded, shared responsibility becomes a slogan rather than a system.
For the Alliance, advocacy put health promotion and the economics of prevention on the record. Connections expanded through cohosted side events, partner meetings with the IFMSA, ASPQ, and IUHPE and engagement across more than thirty sessions, broadened the Alliance’s practical reach. The week also highlighted capacity building as the quieter but essential pillar to scale community-led solutions. The task ahead is straightforward: keep showing up in the rooms where decisions are made, lift local knowledge from the margins to the centre, and translate commitments into the training, funding, and systems that make prevention real.