I was pleased to join a closed-door roundtable during the WHO’s 79th World Health Assembly in Geneva, hosted by Professor Sofia Gruskin, Distinguished Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences and Law and Director of the USC Institute on Inequalities in Global Health.

The gathering brought together many distinguished global health leaders, including Elhadj As Sy, Chancellor of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Co-Chair of the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board and Chair of the Kofi Annan Foundation Board, and Rajat Khosla, Executive Director of the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (PMNCH), whose 2026 agenda has centred the urgent need to move from crisis management to genuine system correction across women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health.

The USC Institute on Inequalities in Global Health works precisely at the intersection that made this conversation so valuable, advancing the evidence base on what drives health inequality, training the next generation of global health leaders, and engaging directly with the policy processes that determine whether that evidence translates into change. Its cross-sectoral, multidisciplinary approach mirrors the conviction the Wellbeing Foundation Africa holds that the structural conditions producing unequal health outcomes require equally structural responses, grounded in community experience, driven by rigorous evidence, and accountable to the populations they are designed to serve.

Grateful to Professor Gruskin for convening a conversation of this quality and to all those present for the rigour and candour they brought to it, including Dr Bronwyn King AO, founder and CEO of Tobacco Free Portfolios and Co-Founder of Air Club, whose work at the intersection of health, finance and the built environment represents exactly the kind of cross-sectoral thinking needed.

 

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