WHO is the world’s convening body for global health, protecting people from preventable disease, promoting health solutions, helping countries build resilient and equitable health systems to deliver services, and empowering partners. WHO has helped countries apply the latest science and health practice with measurable results: billions are living healthier lives, are benefiting from more effective health systems, and are protected from health emergencies.
But that progress has not been enough to set the health-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on-track to be achieved by 2030. As outlined in the Region’s draft vision ‘Weaving Health for Families, Communities and Societies in the Western Pacific Region (2025−2029)’, our social fabric is threatened by a complex and rapidly changing world: climate change, political tensions, conflict, food supply chain disruptions, worsening economic conditions, and the speed and spread of misinformation on social media, among others.
A stronger WHO for better global health
WHO's current financing model restricts its capacity to address global health challenges. While some donors give flexible and predictable funding, more than 80% of current voluntary contributions are strictly earmarked which has reduced flexibility and led to inefficiencies and areas of underfunding. Sustainable funding will enable WHO to stay focused on global health priorities, ensure its integrity, impartiality, and independence from special interests, plan better, maintain a stable workforce, respond faster to emerging threats, ensure fair allocation of funds across the national, regional, and global levels of WHO, and better fund areas that are not currently well resourced (for example, neglected tropical diseases, health workforce, social determinants of health, among others).
The Investment Round
The Investment Round aims to fund the WHO’s 2025-2028 strategy (known as the ‘Fourteenth General Programme of Work’ or GPW14), which sets a high-level road map for global health and will guide WHO’s work in support of Member States and partners for the four-year period 2025-2028, to reinvigorate actions needed to get the health-related SDGs on track, while future-proofing health and care systems for the post-SDG era.
The Investment Round will progress through a series of high-profile events in 2024 including for most regions at Regional Committee meetings, at the UN General Assembly in September, the World Health Summit in October, and will culminate in a high-visibility financing event, hosted by Brazil, at the G20 Leaders’ Summit on 18-19 November 2024.
Investment Round Special Event
A regional special event for the Investment Round will be organized in Manila on 22 October 2024, during the seventy-fifth session of the WHO Regional Committee for the Western Pacific, for Member States and partners in the Region to announce commitments and financial support.
The event will be part of the Regional Committee meeting livestream coverage on X, Facebook, YouTube, and the RCM75 web page.
Session Recording