From a New Director-General to Women Leaders in Global Health: A Week at the World Health Assembly

For the last two and a half years THET has been an NGO in official relations with the WHO, which allows us to work collaboratively on areas of common interest, defining a programme of work to suit those goals. One of the privileges it brings is the opportunity to attend the WHA in an official capacity.

Despite an extremely packed schedule and a plethora of events to choose from, I really enjoy attending the Assembly. After all it is a real melting pot of decision and policy makers – anyone who is anyone in global health is there – and it offers such a unique opportunity to network and raise the profile of THET in the global health community.

The WHA is at the forefront of global health initiatives as it is the formal decision making gathering of all of the member states of the WHO. The week has a very formal agenda which often leads to the passing of key resolutions which are then then given to the Director General and the Secretariat to implement. It is where a lot of global health policy decisions are made.

Last year for instance the ‘big piece’ was on Workforce Development 2030. The year before we had the resolution on Essential Surgery and Surgical Care. The difficulty for all if is that it is great to realise the global potential of resolutions and to have them passed but often the funds are not there to implement them and that’s the classic case with surgery at the moment.

Of course the week was dominated by the election of the new Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus  who THET are really proud to have worked with in the past within Ethiopia on the development of Non-Communicable Diseases programmes and partnerships. With his particular emphasis on UHC, something THET continues to advocate for, we are excited to see what the next five-years of the WHO will look like.

After the great excitement of the election, many of the themes that arose spoke to THET’s particular focus on workforce development from global health security and resilience to essential surgery.

The official side events, provided a great opportunity for us and other NGOs to make official statements within the sessions which helped to identify potential collaborations and networking opportunities.

One of the highlights for me was the official side-event on

“Scaling-up access to emergency and essential surgical, obstetric and anaesthesia care for better health systems and sustainable development”.

During this session the Zambian government launched their National Surgical, Obstetric, and Anaesthesia Strategic Plan which THET and particularly our country office team in Zambia have helped to develop.

With our current KPI focus on understanding and furthering gender equality within health partnerships it was great to see so many sessions on women in global health. A particularly interesting session was on women leaders in health system strengthening, which featured a cross-sectoral panel who discussed the fight many women have faced in overcoming the many obstacles that stand in the way of progress in women’s leadership.

After a week of events, meetings and networking came to a close and as we look to renew our official relations status in 2018, the Assembly proved just as thought-provoking and vital in furthering the progress of global health actions, particularly for us in terms of collaboration with the WHO on global security, work force improvement, and surgery.