WHO Director-General's opening remarks at the High-Level Meeting on the Global Health Architecture – 7 April 2026

Your Excellency Emmanuel Macron, President of France,

Your Excellency Hun Sen, President of Cambodia,

Your Excellency John Mahama, President of Ghana,

Your Excellency Duma Boko, President of Botswana,

Excellencies, distinguished colleagues, dear colleagues and friends,

I thank President Macron for bringing us together today, and for his leadership at this critical moment, just as he convened us at a critical moment in 2020 to create the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator.

Your Excellency, your leadership again now is both welcome and very much needed.

As you all know, we are facing a convergence of pressures: demographic, economic, environmental, epidemiological and geopolitical.

We must be honest: the global health architecture has not kept pace.

Today, it is characterized by fragmentation, duplication, misaligned priorities, competition, gaps in financing, and persistent power imbalances.

Reform is no longer optional for any of us in the global health system.

For WHO, change is a constant.

Over the past nine years, we have implemented a profound process of Transformation to the way WHO is financed, to our focus on science, and to the support we give countries, including through the WHO Academy here in Lyon, which I had the honour to open with President Macron in December 2024.

Over the past year, we have built on that Transformation through a process of prioritization and realignment.

We are now moving forward as a leaner organization, more focused on our core mandate and comparative advantage, scaling down where we need to and facilitating others to do what they are mandated to do, based on their comparative advantage.

But we cannot only reform the component parts of the global health architecture. The time has come to reform the architecture itself.

Countries themselves are leading this reform.

In February, they entrusted WHO with a mandate to host a joint process of reform that is country-centred, inclusive and transparent.

Together with a wide array of partners, we are now designing this joint process, which we will present for consideration by the World Health Assembly in May.

The Health Assembly is not only the highest decision-making body for WHO, it is the highest decision-making body for global health; a forum for all nations, and all partners.

I want to emphasise that WHO is approaching this process with humility, as a convener of equals.

And we are committed to harnessing our country presence in more than 150 countries to advance our shared agenda.

I also want to emphasise that our purpose is not to launch a new initiative, but to bring together existing work in a coherent way.

That includes the work led by President Mahama through the Accra Reset, the work of the Lusaka Agenda, as well as consultations led by the Wellcome Trust, the EU Commission, the AU and Africa CDC, civil society, and others.

These consultations have led to encouraging engagement and convergence around key principles, including country priorities, financing, global public goods, domestic resources and more.

The months ahead will require difficult choices and trade-offs from us all.

But they also offer an opportunity to clarify mandates, improve ways of working, and build a global health architecture that is better aligned with country needs and realities.

Our shared vision now must be the same as the vision countries had when they established WHO 78 years ago: the highest attainable standard of health for all people, not as a luxury for some, but a right for all.

Once again, my deep thanks to President Macron for his leadership at this critical time.

We look forward to our continued partnership in the months ahead.

Merci beaucoup.