Advocacy Update

April 23, 2024

Global Health Security Strategy

Last week, the Biden administration released its strategy to strengthen global health security, demonstrating its continued commitment to protecting against future health threats. The strategy outlines three key goals:

  1. Strengthening bilateral partnerships
  2. Catalyzing political commitment, financing, and leadership
  3. Increasing linkages between global health security and complementary programs

For examples of how the U.S. is partnering with other countries, as well as success stories and investments in global health security, we encourage you to visit the new Global Health Security Partnership web page.

World Health Assembly

The 77th World Health Assembly is quickly approaching. The key issues GHC will be watching for are:

  • Universal Health Coverage (agenda item 11.1)
  • Antimicrobial resistance (agenda item 11.8)
  • INB agreement on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response (agenda item 13.4)
  • Climate change (agenda item 15.4)
  • GPW14, the General Programme of Work, which guides WHO’s work for the next several years (agenda item 17)
  • Non-State Actor engagement

You may also be interested in the recording of GHC’s recent WHA 101 webinar.

Social Participation Resolution

The WHO Executive Board recently presented a resolution, led by Thailand and Slovenia, to institutionalize social participation (the inclusion of civil society and other non-governmental stakeholders in decision-making processes) to accelerate progress towards universal health coverage and the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Social participation is essential to ensure that health policies are responsive, equitable, and effective.

We are currently working to build political support for the resolution and increase the chances of its adoption by Member States during the World Health Assembly. The CSEM (GHC sits on the Advisory Group) and SPHERE (GHC is a member of the Core Committee) have developed resources to support advocacy efforts. We encourage you to use them to help maintain support for the resolution.

U.S. Global Health Appropriations

With the finalization of the Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 budget and the release of the President’s FY25 budget, advocacy for FY25 budget negotiations is ramping up. With the parameters of the Fiscal Responsibility Act still in place, the budget environment is likely to be much the same as it has been. In our conversations with Hill offices, GHC continues to advocate for needs-based funding recommendations for U.S. global health programs, while also acknowledging that the current fiscal environment is constrained. As you undertake your organizational advocacy efforts, we encourage you to use this document, which GHC developed as a starting point to outline the community’s asks.