Your Excellency Ambassador Salim Baddoura,
Your Excellency Ambassador Henri Eli Monceau,
Excellencies, dear colleagues and friends,
Bonjour à toutes et à tous,
Good afternoon and welcome. Thank you all for joining us, and thank you for your continuing commitment to WHO, global health, and multilateralism.
Thank you also to all Francophone countries for your commitment to negotiating the WHO Pandemic Agreement over the past three-and-a-half years.
After a long week and a marathon session on Friday that lasted until 9 a.m. on Saturday morning, the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body is close to delivering on its mandate.
The INB has agreed to resume negotiations tomorrow, in what we hope will be the final session. The finish line is in sight.
I would like to thank especially Her Excellency Ambassador Anne-Claire Amprou, who has led INB as co-chair over the past year.
If finalized and adopted at the World Health Assembly, the Pandemic Agreement will be a landmark instrument of international law that addresses the gaps in global health security exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic:
Insufficient cooperation between countries, inadequate sharing of information, and inequitable access to vaccines and other medical countermeasures.
The Agreement is based on the fundamental principle that shared threats demand a shared response.
While the Pandemic Agreement has been under negotiation, we have already taken many steps to strengthen global health security, based on the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic:
We have established the Pandemic Fund, the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, the mRNA Technology Transfer Programme, the BioHub, the Global Health Emergency Corps, the Interim Medical Countermeasures Network, the Universal Health and Preparedness Review, and more.
And at last year’s World Health Assembly, Member States adopted a package of amendments to the International Health Regulations.
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As you know, the U.S. has also announced its intention to withdraw from WHO, and we are working fast to adapt to that withdrawal.
Although this decision came as a shock, we saw it coming.
After I became Director-General in 2017, we began a process of Transformation, identifying weaknesses and taking steps to address them.
We identified WHO’s over-reliance on a handful of traditional donors, especially the U.S., as the single greatest risk to the organization.
Over the past several years, we have taken significant steps to broaden our donor base and get on track for sustainable financing.
We established the WHO Foundation, conducted our first Investment Round, and our Member States took the historic decision to progressively increase assessed contributions to 50% of our budget.
At its meeting in February, the Executive Board recommended the next increase in assessed contributions, which Member States will consider at next month’s World Health Assembly.
We ask Member States to support that recommendation, and we ask those countries that have not already contributed to the Investment Round to do so.
The measures we have taken have certainly put us in a better position than we would have been otherwise. The way forward is to continue to broaden the donor base of WHO, because a broader donor base can absorb shocks and also empower the organization.
Nonetheless, we are facing an income gap of US$ 600 million this year.
We have therefore proposed to Member States a reduced budget of US$ 4.2 billion for the 2026-2027 biennium – a 21% reduction from the original proposed budget of US$ 5.3 billion.
Of course, this means we will also need to reduce the size of our workforce, and the scale of our work.
We are now conducting a prioritization exercise to ensure that as we move forward, we do it based on our core mission and mandate, leveraging our comparative advantage.
Although we face a very challenging situation, we also see this as an opportunity to reshape the organization to make WHO more sustainable, stronger, empowered and independent.
In the meantime, we are getting on with the job and continuing to serve our Member States to the best of our ability.
Because while the U.S. withdrawal will have a major impact on WHO, the cuts to bilateral funding by the U.S. and others are having a much greater impact.
The sudden withdrawal of funding without warning has caused severe disruption to health services in at least 70 countries.
We see disruptions to information systems and supply chains, closures of health facilities, job losses for health workers, and increased out-of-pocket health spending.
WHO has been working with countries for many years to support them to transition away from aid dependency to sustainable self-reliance, based on domestic resources.
Already several countries have taken steps to revise budgets, cut costs, reallocate funds and mobilize resources.
There are also several tools that countries can use to generate new sources of revenue.
In the short term, immediate measures include introducing or increasing taxes on products that harm health, including tobacco and alcohol.
In the longer term, countries that don’t already have social and community-based health insurance can introduce it, in which individuals or families contribute a small amount to a fund which finances health services.
WHO is working with affected countries to identify which measures are best for them, and to tailor those measures accordingly.
We ask donors to support countries by allowing them to reprogramme funding flexibly according to country priorities, based on the principle of one plan, one budget, one report.
Many countries will still require significant loans from development banks at concessional rates, and at the right terms.
In fact, we already have an initiative to support countries to access that funding.
Last year we launched the Health Impact Investment Platform, a partnership between WHO and multilateral development banks to make over US$ 1.5 billion in concessional funding accessible to low- and middle-income countries to support primary health care.
With an initial focus on Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean region,
seven members of the Francophonie are working with the platform already.
And of course, efforts to build local capacity will be greatly assisted by the launch of the WHO Academy in Lyon last year, where we were honoured to have the participation of His Excellency President Macron and the Secretary-General of the OIF, Louise Mushikiwabo.
The first training session for Francophone health workers is expected this year.
Excellencies, WHO and the Francophone community share a vision: a world where every country, regardless of economic status, can safeguard the health of its people.
In these difficult times, the support of Francophone Member States is crucial.
By working together, we can build political momentum for lasting impact, so that health remains a pillar of resilience, stability, and progress in the Francophone space and beyond.
Merci. I thank you, and I look forward to our discussion today.