Strengthening National Health Agencies for Future Pandemics

National Public Health Agencies (NPHAs) play a critical role in preventing, detecting, and responding to public health threats. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed critical weaknesses in many NPHAs’ ability to deliver these core functions—often due not to lack of expertise or commitment but to governance and structural constraints that undermine their performance. These included limited legal mandates, rigid bureaucracies, unclear accountability lines, and insufficient autonomy in decision-making, resource allocation, and coordination.

Despite the expansion of NPHAs’ mandates to address emerging issues like antimicrobial resistance, climate-related hazards, and emerging threats, governance models have often not kept pace. In many settings, NPHAs are being restructured or newly established. Yet, there remains little systematic evidence on how governance arrangements affect their effectiveness.

Recognizing this critical gap, the WHO Health Emergencies Programme and the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research launched a multi-country learning program to examine governance and structural arrangements of NPHAs across diverse contexts—from autonomous agencies to line ministries, and from established to newly formed NPHAs.

This session will bring together NPHA leaders, policymakers, and researchers to discuss how governance reforms have and can strengthen the ability of NPHAs to deliver on their mandates in both routine and emergency contexts. It will reflect on findings from applied health policy and systems research (HPSR) conducted in eleven countries to highlight how national leaders, international organizations, and funders can support more effective governance arrangements and translate lessons from recent reforms into actionable strategies across contexts.