Keynote Speech by Dr Hanan Balkhy, WHO Regional Director for the Eastern Mediterranean. WHA79 Side Event – World Health Summit From Shock to Strength: Reimagining Health[...]

20 MAY 2026

Ilona, thank you. Distinguished colleagues, friends,

The title of this address asks us to reimagine health resilience as the transition from shock to strength.

The challenge is that, from where I stand in the Eastern Mediterranean Region, shock is not the exception. It is a daily reality.

And it is no longer a matter of moving from one crisis to the next. Multiple crises now collide conflict, displacement, outbreaks, climate pressures and economic instability with no clear end in sight.

So when do you catch your breath? When do you stop long enough to recover, regroup and move from perpetual shock to something resembling strength?

For many countries in our Region, the answer is simple: you do not stop. You keep moving, just as the punches keep coming.

Today, the Eastern Mediterranean carries nearly half of the world's humanitarian burden. We are managing 14 WHO-graded emergencies, including 7 at the highest level: two years of devastation in Gaza, more than 1,000 days of brutal war in Sudan, and chronically underfunded crises in Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan with no end in sight.

The Region's health workforce is being hollowed out by conflict, migration, burnout and displacement. Mental health and substance use disorders are rising sharply across populations already under enormous strain. And conflicts are proliferating faster than many systems can recover from them.

In our Region, the humanitarian, development and peace agendas are not sequential phases. They are simultaneous realities and our financing and governance systems must span all three.

So how do we respond?

First, resilience starts with people.

No innovation succeeds if there are not enough health workers left to deliver care. Yet the Region has just 16.5 nurses and midwives per 10,000 people less than half the global average and faces a projected shortage of 1.2 million nurses by 2030.

Health workers are also increasingly under direct threat. In 2025 alone, attacks on health care across our Region caused nearly 1,800 deaths.

That is why WHO has made health workforce strengthening a regional priority supporting countries on planning, nursing reform, education and retention.

At the same time, prolonged conflict is driving a major mental health and substance use crisis. The Region carries the second-highest burden of mental health conditions globally, while treatment gaps remain severe in many countries.

WHO is expanding community-based mental health and substance use services, integrating care into primary health care, and strengthening psychosocial support in emergencies.

Because a system that rebuilds hospitals but neglects mental health remains fundamentally fragile.

Second, resilience requires preparedness.

Traditionally, preparedness has meant building systems before the crisis arrives. But in much of our Region, the crisis is already here. We are strengthening systems while they are under pressure.

In Yemen despite one of the world's worst humanitarian crises WHO has expanded disease surveillance to more than 2,700 sentinel sites and deployed over 330 Rapid Response Teams across 134 districts. Those teams have conducted more than 142,000 field missions to detect and investigate outbreak alerts.

Preparedness also means prepositioning supplies before disaster strikes. When the pager and radio attacks in Lebanon injured thousands of people within hours, WHO was able to respond immediately because emergency supplies had already been positioned across the country.

But resilience is not only about emergency response. It is also about building systems that can absorb shocks without collapsing.

That means stronger supply chains, stronger regulatory authorities and greater regional capacity to produce medicines and vaccines. Through our Access to Medical Products initiative, countries are strengthening regulatory systems, expanding pooled procurement and reducing dependence on fragile global supply chains.

And innovation has a role to play.

Working with the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence in Berlin, EMRO has developed the AI-powered AIM Toolkit to support emergency operations. The platform automates rapid risk assessments and response plans that once took days or weeks to produce. When a measles outbreak emerged in Morocco, it generated a full risk assessment in minutes giving response teams a head start that manual processes simply could not.

Third, resilience requires financing that matches the burden.

Across our Region, out-of-pocket health spending remains high, development assistance is declining, and preparedness is chronically underfunded.

But we are not waiting for the system to fix itself. WHO EMRO has established a Regional Health Financing Taskforce, supported domestic resource mobilization, and advanced innovative approaches including Islamic financing mechanisms such as zakat and sukuk. Eight countries in our Region have also secured more than US$150 million through the Pandemic Fund.

But resilience cannot rely on emergency appeals and temporary attention. Preparedness must be treated as a long-term investment, not an afterthought. And if we do not invest in resilience now, we will have to pay much more later.

We often talk about resilience as something built before disaster strikes. But when you have not seen a dry day in years, you build the ship while navigating the flood.

That is what resilience looks like in the Eastern Mediterranean Region. Despite everything, we are still building, still adapting and still moving forward.

And my message to this room is simple: do not look away.

Disease, displacement and supply chain disruption do not stop at borders. What happens in the Eastern Mediterranean does not stay there.