As a non-state actor in official relations with the WHO, The Task Force co-hosted two side events and engaged in many convenings throughout the week, while also tracking official proceedings on critical agenda items. Representatives from The Task Force’s External Relations team, the Coalition for Global Hepatitis Elimination (CGHE), and the Health Campaign Effectiveness Coalition (HCE) joined global leaders, partners, and advocates to advance discussions on neglected tropical diseases, hepatitis elimination, and strengthening health systems worldwide.
Key WHA decisions at a high-stakes moment:
Convened the very next day after the declaration of a public health emergency of international concern over an epidemic of Ebola disease in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, WHA79 was marked by widespread concern over the outbreak, but still advanced international cooperation on a range of persistent global health challenges. Overall, Member States adopted more than 20 decisions and a dozen resolutions on health issues throughout the Assembly. Highlights included a unanimous decision by Member States to move forward with a joint process on global health architecture reform, with a final report with options and recommendations for the transformation of the global health architecture to be submitted by the WHO Director-General to next year’s Assembly; the adoption of an updated global action plan on antimicrobial resistance to guide the next decade of multisectoral and multilateral effort against this urgent health threat; landmark resolutions on precision medicine, equitable access to diagnostic imaging, reducing the burden of stroke, and smart and efficient pharmacovigilance, urging the prioritization of medicine and vaccine safety monitoring; and the endorsement of a new strategy on the economics of health for all, aimed at aligning economic systems with health, equity and sustainable development.
The Task Force tracked important negotiations and decisions throughout WHA week and endorsed three non-state actor constituency statements on key agenda items. Full statements are available at the end of this recap.
In the year leading up to WHA80 in 2027, WHO Member States will navigate extended negotiations to finalize a Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) annex to the Pandemic Agreement, the establishment of a high-stakes joint process to support reforms of global health architecture, and the race to elect the next WHO Director General. The Task Force looks forward to participating in preparations for a particularly consequential WHA80. Read on for highlights from Task Force activities on Wednesday, May 20 during WHA79:
“Elevating Hepatitis Elimination on the Global Political Agenda: From World Health Assembly to United Nations General Assembly”
CGHE co-convened an official side event with eight member states and the African Union. With robust participation from 26 countries and three regional hubs, a new Ministerial Statement calls for concrete political actions leading to a WHA resolution and a UN High-Level Meeting on Hepatitis Elimination.
Speakers emphasized that achieving elimination goals will require greater political leadership, sustained financing, and expanded access to prevention and treatment services. Despite the availability of vaccines, diagnostics, and curative treatment, viral hepatitis still causes an estimated 1.3 million deaths each year worldwide.
Led by Cameroon, the event brought together a cross-regional coalition of Member States, including Brazil, Egypt, Ghana, Malaysia, Pakistan, Spain, and Uganda, along with the African Union and WHO. Cameroon’s Hon. Dr. Manouda Malachie presented the Ministerial Statement.
“We need to bring hepatitis elimination from a technical issue to a political and strategic one,” he said. “Cameroon is calling upon all member states and their partners to commit to measurable and sustainable actions. Together, let’s ensure that commitments taken today will bear fruit tomorrow.”
CGHE Director Dr. John W. Ward co-moderated the session with WHO leader Dr. Tereza Kasaeva, Director of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global Tuberculosis Programme. In addition to endorsing the call for a high-level meeting, participants focused on strengthening accountability, accelerating implementation of hepatitis programs, and ensuring hepatitis elimination remains part of broader global health and development priorities in the years ahead.
The full recording is available here.
“Sustaining the momentum: cross-border collaboration to achieve Malaria and NTD Elimination.”
The HCE Coalition collaborated with co-conveners from the WHO’s Global Onchocerciasis Network for Elimination and the African Union Commission, alongside partners African Leaders Malaria Alliance, Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative, The END Fund, and RBM Partnership to End Malaria on a side event to address a critical challenge: accelerating disease elimination amidst a landscape of declining global funding.
Because malaria and neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) easily cross borders through trade, migration, and seasonal travel, unilateral country efforts are insufficient. Coordinated cross-border action is vital to prevent disease resurgence, protect hard-won health gains, and build resilient, integrated health systems that support primary health care.
At the event, a distinguished panel of Health Ministers and senior African officials across 10 countries reaffirmed their commitment to strengthening cross-border collaboration to accelerate the elimination of malaria and NTDs, while highlighting the development of a new memorandum of understanding to support coordinated and sustained action across borders.
Dr. Michael Adekunle Charles, Chief Executive Officer of RBM Partnership to End Malaria, a member organization of the HCE Coalition Leadership Team, said,, “today’s discussions also reinforced a central lesson: integration is not simply an operational choice — it is a strategic necessity. Bringing malaria and NTD services closer together, and embedding them within broader health systems and primary health care, enables countries to maximize the impact of limited resources, reduce duplication, strengthen surveillance and service delivery, and build more resilient systems that can better respond to current and future health challenges.”
The HCE Coalition’s Collaborative Action Strategy for Health Campaign Effectiveness offers countries a practical tool for coordinated, country-led planning that will advance cross-border disease elimination goals while strengthening resilient, integrated health systems.
For the HCE Coalition, this is what it’s all about—supporting countries and partners to better align, plan, and deliver more collaborative health campaigns that maximize impact and reach the communities who need them most.
See the WHO press release for more about the event.
Constituency Statement on Agenda item 12.5, Primary Health Care, delivered by Save the Children
The year 2025 marked the steepest annual decline in official development assistance on record. As a result, an additional 5.4 million preventable deaths of children under five by 2030 are estimated as many low- and middle-income countries struggle to fund Primary Health Care.
This moment represents more than a funding gap—it is a stress test for the solidarity in the global health architecture. In collaboration with the WHO Civil Society Commission, Sustainable Health Financing Working Group, we received inputs from over 270 CSOs from around the world about the most important actions for member states and WHO to commit to at the WHA and ahead of the 2027 UHC High Level meeting. We ask member states to prioritize the following four asks:
- Protect life-saving services by prioritising primary health care, realizing UHC, and reinvesting in essential services lost to funding cuts;
- Publicly commit to mobilising domestic resources through equitable taxation, improving public financial management, with clear national health spending targets, while supporting debt relief and addressing illicit flows;
- Institutionalise meaningful civil society participation in health financing decision-making at all levels in alignment with the resolution on social participation;
- Strengthen transparency and accountability through timely availability of disaggregated health financing data.
Constituency Statement on Agenda item 12.5, Primary Health Care, delivered by the International Alliance of Patients’ Organizations
We speak on behalf of patients, people with lived experience and health communities worldwide. We welcome the Director-General’s report on primary healthcare as the foundation for universal health coverage.
PHC is where most people meet the health system, or fail to – particularly for caregivers and persons living with HIV, NTDs, NCDs, mental health conditions, rare diseases, bleeding disorders or multimorbidity. PHC is not an abstract reform: it determines whether we are diagnosed early, treated with dignity in a clean, safe environment, and supported across the life course, including access to acute and palliative care.
We highlight three priorities as the 2027 High-Level Meeting on UHC approaches:
- First, meaningful engagement. The report stresses empowered people and communities. Yet our constituencies remain inconsistently included in PHC design, financing, implementation and governance. Social participation must move from principle to practice.
- Second, person-centred integration. Fragmented vertical programmes still shape care pathways. Person-, not disease-centred integration is essential, including for HIV, NTDs, NCDs, circulatory health, comorbidities and acute conditions.
- Third, accountability with people-centred indicators. Coverage metrics alone do not capture quality, safety, equity or experience of care. Monitoring frameworks must include functional measures co-developed with those they are meant to serve.
We stand ready to work with WHO and Member States to translate the promise of PHC into tangible action for patients, people with lived experience and communities.
Constituency Statement on Agenda item 20.1, Reform of the Global Health Architecture and UN80, delivered by Save the Children
We support WHO’s leadership in shaping the Global Health Architecture (GHA) by bringing initiatives together for systemic change that protects the rights, health, and well-being of all, including children.
Meaningful reform of the GHA—given its scale and diversity of stakeholders—will only be achieved if all perspectives are heard, particularly those delivering essential health and nutrition services in humanitarian and development contexts and those underrepresented in decision-making. Discussions must address the root causes of inequity within the current system and the barriers to equal participation.
We call on Member States to:
- Adopt a human- and child rights-based approach, ensuring that GHA reform advances the right to health for all through UHC and PHC.
- Recognize that humanitarian settings—driven by conflict and climate change—experience prolonged crises, bear an increasing burden of maternal and child mortality, and are severely affected by aid cuts.
- Ensure transparent, inclusive and accessible engagement of people with lived experience, civil society, and humanitarian actors, in discussions at all levels, including the joint task force on GHA reform, and prioritize their participation in Global Health Initiatives governance mechanisms.
- Address structural drivers of inequality, and sustainable domestic health financing, including debt relief, and access to essential commodities and medicines, in alignment with UN processes for sustainable solutions.
- Ensure accountability to communities the GHA serves and prioritize health, nutrition and the humanitarian response in UN80.
