Active Public Health & Healthcare Climate, Earth & Environment

Convening and elevating civil society and community visions towards reimagining the global health architecture

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Recipient organisation WACI Health
Funding £529K
Period Sept 2025 — Jul 2026

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Civil society organisations across global health are gathering to draft their own blueprints for how the world should govern pandemic response, drug access, and health funding. The problem is that while global health institutions often consult civil society groups, those groups rarely get to shape the rules from the start. Existing reform processes—such as those around the World Health Organization, pandemic treaties, and development finance—tend to be dominated by governments and large funders, leaving community perspectives sidelined. Over ten months starting June 2025, a coalition of diverse civil society organisations will run workshops and consultations at global, regional, and national levels. Their goal is to produce a shared, articulated vision for a more inclusive and equitable global health architecture, and to ensure that vision reaches every relevant decision-making forum. If this succeeds, future health governance could become structurally more responsive to the people it is meant to serve—not just in rhetoric, but in how boards are composed, how funds are allocated, and how accountability is enforced. This is not fundamental science; it is a deliberate political and organisational intervention to shift who holds power in global health.

View original technical description
As multi-stakeholder processes begin to discuss the future of the development, financial and health architectures, it is critical that all key stakeholders are involved from the beginning. Some global institutions and processes, in particular within global health, have a strong track record of engaging and involving civil society and communities in governance and decision-making. However, meaningful civil society and community involvement still need to be advocated for and won. In parallel, there is a need to support civil society and communities to come together to articulate and advance what progressive visions of a more sustainable and equitable future global health architecture might look like. We are a small group of diverse and well-informed civil society and community organisations. Through a 10 month project beginning June of 2025 and concluding in March 2026, our goal is to ensure that civil society and communities across global health, at global, regional and national level, are supported to develop and articulate their own visions for the future of the global health ecosystem and that they are able to share those visions in all existing and new processes looking at reforming the global health ecosystem to become more inclusive, equitable, and responsive to their needs.

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Researchers

Rosemary Mburu (EPMC Awardee)

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Original classification

Discretionary Award

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.