World Health Summit

First time I'm meeting Catherine in person, believe it or not.

And so we had to have the World Health Summit to bring us all together and to have Sonia, a very dear friend, on our show.

And so very excited about this.

There's not less money.

But you want these processes not to be constantly changing every time someone comes into power.

And if I may, Gary, in the last 10 seconds that I have, to just address that power issue that was mentioned about civil society, because I think it's so important.

I saw here at the World Health Summit, the WHO Youth Council, for example, stepping up and fighting for addressing climate change more seriously.

And so, yes, we need to support civil society and so forth, but we also need to motivate, especially the younger generation, hopefully to contaminate the rest of the population to, in the sage words of Bob Marley, get up and stand up and fight for our health because we need the voice of the people involved in the process now more than ever.

I'm an associate editor here at Devex, and I'm joined by our global health reporters, Andrew Green and Sarah Jervling.

We are recording live from our content studio at the World Health Summit here in Berlin.

Sarah, this is your very first time at the World Health Summit.

You've been covering global health for years.

How are you finding the experience?

But Andrew, 'cause you're based in Berlin, you've been coming here for years, but you s- you've mentioned as well when we're talking amongst each other that this is, this feels a bit bigger than in previous years.

Yeah.

It's, the World Health Summit has really, really grown over the past couple of editions.

Away from education, Health Minister Kwabena Minta Akando is calling for global health partnerships that respect countries' control over their health policies and priorities as Ghana targets a major increase in domestic health funding.

His call at the World Health Summit comes days after President John Mahama disclosed that cabinet rejected a US health compact over terms the government believes could undermine Ghana's control over its health data, policies and priorities.

Mr. Akando says global health systems must respond to local needs and realities.

Global health must not be designed for countries.

Those same questions, Peter, have been raised over decades and almost always come to a head when we're in the midst of a leadership race.

So it is saying a lot that this is the worst crisis, but I'm heading to the World Health Summit tomorrow in Berlin, and I have no doubt over the next three or four days, I'm going to be hearing a lot of people criticizing, or perhaps not criticizing, but expressing concern, let's say, about the state of affairs and really the challenge that's ahead of one of these seven or so individuals who have been brave enough to allow their countries to nominate them because this is a very, very complex job, as you and I have talked about many times.

Yeah, brave.

And I've got respect for all of them.

Is there anything you wanted to say just before we closed?

Well, I think for people who are interested in being more engaged in the process, now that it's beginning to be confirmed who our candidates are, there's opportunities to hear people speak.

At the World Health Summit in Berlin, there is going to be a panel with some of the candidates present.

There'll be a live stream, but also recording that people can look at.

Hope you'll join me so we can say goodbye.

It's one day to the World Health Summit, nine days to Alberta's referendum, and seven days till we meet again on Day6.

Well, um, what?

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/podcasts.

But I also think now people are thinking more broader on how do we actually like change the systems and whatnot.

Are these some of the conversations that you're expecting to have at the World Health Summit, which you will be attending next week?

Yeah, I think it's really interesting.

So the, the theme for this year's World Health Summit is From Crisis to Resilience, and I guess as I've been thinking about it, uh, my question is which crisis are they even talking about? Because it seems like there are so many, and the, the program itself doesn't lend itse- lend itself to like one specific narrative.

I mean, they are addressing the crisis of climate change on global health.

They're addressing the crisis of ongoing conflicts like the war in Ukraine on global health, but then also the new crisis of what the upending of the global HIV response because of the drawdown on US funding and what that's going to mean for that.

So it's-- there, there are all these multiple crises that I think people are individually engaged in or engaged in within like their, their expert subject area.

At the same time, they're coming together at this conference to think about a broader plan, what, what it's going to look like to be able to address all those things simultaneously.