The six central topics are the thematic tracks of the main program of the World Health Summit 2026. They reflect current and emerging challenges in global health, informed by research and the priorities of the WHS community, including participants, speakers, and the WHS Academic Alliance. Beyond these topics, the WHS 2026 program addresses a range of additional issues shaping global health today.
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The global health architecture faces persistent structural challenges that affect its effectiveness and perpetuate inequity. The system is characterized by fragmentation, overlapping initiatives, and vertical programs, resulting in duplication, misalignment, and limited accountability. Power and resources remain concentrated among high-income countries and major donors, while geopolitical power shifts, declining trust and a weakening commitment to multilateralism undermine collective action.
These pressures have been compounded by declining official development assistance (ODA): in 2025 alone, ODA fell by 23% according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The cuts were widespread, with 26 of 34 OECD members reducing their budgets, including the five largest donor countries - the United States, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
Low- and middle-income countries are taking steps to strengthen health sovereignty, including through regional manufacturing, South–South cooperation, and domestic health financing aligned with national priorities. Yet incremental reform will be insufficient. Building a resilient global health ecosystem requires rethinking economic paradigms and global power relations while advancing equity, inclusivity, solidarity, and shared accountability.
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Structural inequalities, weak governance, and fragmented surveillance continue to amplify pandemic risks. Infectious disease outbreaks are becoming more frequent – most recently Ebola, hantavirus, and Nipah – and more damaging, with widening health, economic, political, and social impacts and less capacity to recover.
Yet investments have not kept pace. Underfunded preparedness, reactive financing, and dependence on donor-driven priorities limit resilience. These challenges are compounded by delayed data sharing, unequal access to care as well as political barriers to transparency, which weaken early detection and coordinated response. The COVID-19 pandemic illustrated these gaps vividly, and despite repeated commitments, political attention rises during crises only to fade once the immediate threat subsides.
Effective preparedness depends on the capacity to prevent, detect, adapt, and respond to health threats, including through robust laboratory networks, a trained workforce, and risk communication. These capacities matter most in fragile settings and rely on trusted local actors to detect risks early. Resilience also extends to supply chains, social protection, and multisectoral governance. The WHO Pandemic Agreement and its still-to-be-approved annex on access and benefit sharing offer a critical opportunity to advance this, improving cooperation on pathogen access, technology transfer, and financing while reinforcing accountability for equitable global health security.
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Women, children, and youth continue to bear the brunt of global health inequities. After decades of progress, reductions in maternal mortality have stalled, adolescent mental health challenges are rising, and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) remain out of reach for many.
The causes are structural. Reduced official development assistance, discriminatory laws, restrictive gender norms, social inequalities, and weak health infrastructure reinforce disparities. Climate shocks, conflict, and displacement amplify already acute vulnerabilities, while persistent data gaps and gender bias in financing obscure inequities and undermine effective policy action.
Coordinated measures, from rights-based financing to reforms against child marriage and gender-based violence, are needed to tackle these drivers directly. What will translate them into lasting change is accountability, built on disaggregated data and the genuine participation and leadership of women, children, and youth in the decisions that shape their health.
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Health systems worldwide are under growing strain from aging populations, the rise of noncommunicable diseases, workforce shortages, drug resistance, and climate change. These pressures coincide with rapid digital transformation, including artificial intelligence (AI), predictive analytics, and digital health technologies that are reshaping diagnostics, surveillance, and resource management. Introduced responsibly and at scale, they can enable earlier outbreak detection, faster drug development, stronger community-based primary care, and better clinical decisions.
Realizing this potential depends on interoperable data systems, ethical oversight, and equitable access, especially in low- and middle-income countries where data gaps persist. But gaps are not the only obstacle: algorithmic bias, uneven data quality, and market concentration hinder fair implementation.
Yet technology alone cannot build resilient health systems. Resilience also depends on a transformed health workforce, stronger prevention approaches, strengthened primary care, and sustainable financing. Future-ready health systems will depend on aligning innovation with human capacity and responsible governance, using data to design adaptive policies that advance health equity, accountability, and sustainability.
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Armed conflicts are placing unprecedented strain on health systems, reversing decades of progress in health and development. Escalating geopolitical instability, including wars, protracted crises, hybrid threats, community violence, and large-scale displacement, affects millions worldwide. These developments are compounded by the erosion of international humanitarian law and a rise in attacks on healthcare facilities and personnel, putting people’s lives at risk, destroying lifesaving infrastructure, disrupting supply chains, and limiting access to care.
In protracted crises, health systems deteriorate, leaving critical gaps in maternal and child health, mental health, and noncommunicable disease management. Conflict settings also become incubators for infectious disease outbreaks, driven by overcrowding, poor sanitation, displacement, and weakened surveillance systems. Alarmingly, sexual and gender-based violence remains systematically used as a weapon of war, with severe and lasting health consequences. Despite growing need, the response itself falls short: attention and funding remain uneven, and externally driven humanitarian interventions can foster dependency, fragment health systems, and create parallel structures.
Addressing these challenges requires a reorientation of the humanitarian–development–peace nexus to strengthen resilience and sustainability. This includes shifting from short-term emergency responses toward approaches that reinforce local capacity and health system recovery. Protecting health systems from being targets of war also means ensuring accountability under international humanitarian law, while positioning health as a bridge to peace and cooperation.
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The future of global health is increasingly shaped by mounting environmental pressures. Climate change, air pollution, rapid urbanization, shifting human-animal interactions, antimicrobial resistance, biodiversity loss, globalized food systems, and the growing influence of commercial actors intersect and amplify health risks.
Climate change is already affecting health worldwide. Its effects are wide-ranging, including shifting disease patterns, rising vector-borne diseases, heat-related illness, extreme weather events, growing food insecurity, displacement, and mental health burdens. These risks fall hardest on groups in vulnerable situations, including low-income communities, migrants, and people with pre-existing health conditions.
Yet despite these escalating risks, momentum on climate and health is stagnating. Political resistance, insufficient cross-sectoral coordination, and competing priorities continue to widen the gap between increasing impacts and the action needed. Addressing this requires placing health at the center of climate and development policy, strengthening resilient and low-carbon health systems, and advancing One Health, an approach that recognizes the interdependence of the health of people, animals and ecosystems.