WHO Director-General's keynote address at the Building a Healthier Asia event – 6 May 2025

Your Excellency President Tharman,

Ms Ho Ching,

Ms Jennie Chua,

Excellencies, distinguished guests, dear colleagues and friends,

Good evening, it's an honour to be here.

I thank the Temasek Foundation for organizing this gathering, and thank you all for joining us this evening.

I thank Your Excellency for your hospitality, and for the opportunity to meet with you this evening.

Thank you also for your strong support for WHO and global health.

I also had the opportunity to meet today with His Excellency Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, and was very interested to learn that he used to be the director of health financing in the Ministry of Health.

We had a very good discussion on the importance of health financing for self-reliance, which is a key issue for many countries right now.

So I am very pleased to see the strong commitment to health from both the President and Prime Minister.

Let me begin by taking you back 60 years, to when Singapore gained independence, in 1965.

It was a very different country to the country we see today, marked by poverty, unemployment and poor health.

Most of the population lived in slums or squatter settlements, without safe water and sanitation.

Today, Singapore enjoys one of the world's longest life expectancies, has one of the world's most advanced health systems, and one of the world's most advanced economies.

That is no accident.

Hand-in-hand with Singapore's economic development have been improvements in public health.

The development of public housing in the 1960s, moving people from wooden huts to apartment buildings with water and sanitation, made a major difference to the health of Singapore's population, which have been the engine of its economic success.

More recently, Singapore has focused on addressing the drivers of noncommunicable diseases that often increase with increasing prosperity.

For example, in 2021, Singapore banned trans fat from its food supply - a major contributor to cardiovascular disease.

The point is this: a healthy population is the foundation of a healthy economy, and a thriving nation.

Healthy people go to school, and finish school. They start families and businesses. They work. They produce. They research. They innovate.

Health is not just a moral imperative - although it is certainly that - it is also an economic imperative.

This is true for individuals, families and communities, but it's also true for societies, economies and the world as a whole.

Just as health is a prerequisite for development, so the opposite is true:

Sick populations are a brake on economies, societies and nations.

COVID-19 was a vivid demonstration that when health is at risk, everything is at risk.

The pandemic killed an estimated 20 million people and wiped more than 10 trillion U.S. dollars from the global economy.

Indeed, a pandemic can kill more people and cause more economic disruption than a war.

Countries invest billions on protecting themselves from attacks by other countries or terrorist groups, but relatively little on protecting themselves from an attack from an invisible enemy; one that has no regard for the lines that humans draw on maps.

Health security is economic security. Both must be balanced.

And both are under threat from dramatic reductions in official development assistance, which is causing severe disruptions to health services in many countries.

We see disruptions to information systems and supply chains, closures of health facilities, job losses for health workers, people missing treatments, and increased out-of-pocket health spending.

Although we face our own financial challenges, WHO is supporting countries to navigate this crisis and to move towards self-reliance.

That is the essence of what WHO does - providing trusted, evidence-based, high-quality technical support to governments across the full range of health issues facing their populations.

Some of what we do makes the headlines, like stopping outbreaks of Ebola, as we did in Uganda this year, or supporting the rollout of malaria vaccines in 17 countries in Africa;

But a lot of what we do goes unseen - the unglamorous technical work of bringing global experts together to distil the latest scientific evidence into guidance;

Or supporting countries to strengthen their health systems - from health financing to data to regulatory systems to their health workforce.

WHO is a unique organization, with a unique constitutional mandate, a unique global footprint, unique global expertise, and unique global legitimacy.

But we cannot do it alone. We work closely with a huge range of partners, including many philanthropies, which are making an incredible impact on global health.

With the support of the Gates Foundation and Rotary, we have driven polio to the brink of eradication.

Likewise, the Carter Foundation has helped to reduce Guinea worm disease from 3.5 million cases in the mid-1980s to just 14 reported cases last year.

By expanding access to free treatment for leprosy, the Sasakawa Foundation has helped to reduce the number of reported cases by more than 95% since the 1980s;

The Buffett Foundation is helping to save the lives of countless women who would otherwise die in pregnancy and childbirth;

And I could give many more examples.

Your support is needed now more than ever - not to fill gaps left by other donors, but to make strategic, catalytic investments that support countries to build capacities and make the transition to sustainable self-reliance.

That is what countries themselves want. The era of aid dependency must come to an end.

I had the opportunity of meeting with many of you this afternoon, and I was heartened by your interest and involvement in health, in many areas.

WHO works across all of these areas, in all of the affected countries, and I can see many opportunities to work with you according to your areas of interest.

We would be very happy to meet with each of you to discuss those opportunities in more detail.

And as many of your interests overlap, we can use our relationships with countries to coordinate investments, align them with country needs, and leverage them for greatest impact.

Thank you all once again for your dedication to health in this region and around the world.

We look forward to your continued leadership and partnership as we work together to realize WHO's founding vision: the highest attainable standard of health - not as a luxury for some, but a right for all.

I thank you.