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Health Equity in Focus
Day two of World Health Summit 2023: GFF pledging, 75 years of WHO, gender equality, pandemic prevention
Berlin, October 16, 2023
On the second day of the World Health Summit 2023 the focus was on topics such as a healthier future for women and girls in the poorest countries of the world, pandemic prevention, 75 years of WHO, and gender equality in health research.
At the Global Financing Pledging Event, a high-level donor gathering, Svenja Schulze, German Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, said, "Women’s rights are human rights." Girls and women make up 50 per cent of the world’s population: “Only girls who are healthy and able to make decisions about their own bodies can grow up to become educated and self-sufficient women who enjoy the same rights, resources and representation as men.”
The Global Financing Facility Partnership aims to secure a healthier future for more than 250 million women, children and youth in the world's poorest countries.
The 75th anniversary of the World Health Organisation (WHO) was the topic of the keynote session in the morning. The health of billions of people is under threat from conflict, air pollution and the climate crisis, and aggressively-marketed products that harm health, said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus WHO Director-General: “All these challenges show why the world needs a strong WHO now more than ever.” WHO faces its own challenges, Dr. Tedros added: “The world’s expectations of WHO have increased substantially but our resources have not.”
Pandemic preparedness was at the center of the morning session. “In pandemic prevention, we’re often ignoring livestock”, said Christian Drosten, Director of the Institute of Virology at Charité. It is known that respiratory pathogens were transmitted from wild animal hosts to humans through livestock: “We’re ignoring this in the policy making. We have to implement livestock surveillance.”
Joy Phumaphi, Co-Chair of the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, called for better funding: “Coming up with a platform for matching human and animal health. That needs a lot of resources, it’s not easy to do.”
Gender equality was the topic at the launch of the Equity 2030 Alliance, a new global partnership for equitable and women-focused research and innovation. “Women walk through a world that was not built for them,” said United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Executive Director Natalia Kanem. “Yet we can redesign the world. We can resolve this challenge if we unite and commit to equity by design, whether in tech, science or finance. The impact will last for generations to come.”
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