I was pleased to attend the Business Council for International Understanding (BCIU) and Pfizer roundtable dinner on Reframing Global Health Partnerships in a Changing Reality, on the sidelines of the WHO’s 79th World Health Assembly in Geneva, a discussion centred on the structural questions now reshaping global health financing and partnership architecture.

The evening brought together a remarkable breadth of senior voices, anchored by Catherine Robinson, Senior Director for Global Trade Policy and International Government Affairs and Lead for Global Access Initiatives and Accord for a Healthier World at Pfizer, Dr. Githinji Gitahi, Group Chief Executive Officer of Amref Health Africa, Dr. Somesh Kumar, Senior Director at Jhpiego, and colleagues from the Minister of Health of the Republic of Ghana, alongside the Africa CDC, the African Union, World Health Organization Africa, Partners in Health, PATH Global Health, the Tony Blair Institute, the NCD Alliance, Project ECHO, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Seed Global Health, among others.

The discussion centred on Pfizer’s Accord for a Healthier World, which commits to offering its full portfolio of patent-protected medicines and vaccines on a not-for-profit basis to 1.2 billion people across 45 lower-income countries, as a concrete example of what a public-private partnership can look like when it is designed with genuine access and systemic intent. The harder question the room was convened to address is what policy architecture, at the national, regional and multilateral levels, is required to move such models from individual corporate initiatives toward structural and scalable responses to a global health financing landscape that is shifting faster than the frameworks designed to govern it.

The Wellbeing Foundation Africa’s experience across Nigeria offers a consistent answer, that the partnerships most likely to endure are those anchored in national ownership, community trust, and accountability frameworks that measure outcomes where the burden is highest.

 

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