The next four years — from 2025 to 2028 — represent a unique opportunity to revive efforts to bring health-related Sustainable Development Goals back on track by 2030, while also making health and care systems resilient and future-oriented for the post-2030 era and for the long-term trends and severe shocks described in Part One.

Achieving this aim requires a strong and exceptional focus on fundamentally improving equity in coverage of health and care services and increasing the resilience of health systems.

It is essential to foster collaboration across sectors in order to achieve shared benefits, address the root causes of diseases and health inequalities, and overcome key barriers to equity such as gender inequality and discrimination.

Reaching this goal in today’s highly challenging environment demands unprecedented coordination among health, development, and humanitarian actors at national, regional, and global levels — with a common vision, priorities, and programme, a unified measurement framework, and a commitment to country-led collective action in support of national goals and leadership.

To facilitate alignment in the global health agenda for 2025–2028 in support of national priorities and impact, the Fourteenth General Programme of Work (GPW 14) of the World Health Organization has been developed through an extensive and inclusive consultation process under the guidance and leadership of the 194 Member States.

This process resulted in broad agreement on the overall goal, strategic objectives, and shared outcomes of GPW 14 — elements that define the high-level results of joint action during the 2025–2028 period and anchor WHO’s role and contributions (see Figure 1 below).

Consequently, these core elements were developed in close consultation with Member States and informed by the valuable perspectives and recommendations of programmes, funds, civil-society and community organizations, youth and older-persons groups, organizations of persons with disabilities, nongovernmental and humanitarian entities, WHO collaborating centres, donors, philanthropic foundations, and private-sector associations.

The broad scope of the overall goal, strategic objectives, and shared outcomes of GPW 14 reflects the ambition of the Sustainable Development Goals as well as the complexity of improving human health and well-being across evolving local and global contexts.

The shared goal, strategic objectives, and outcomes for collective action in 2025–2028.
The overall goal of GPW 14 is to promote, deliver, and protect health and well-being for all people, everywhere.
Embedded within this goal are the principles of equity in health-service coverage and resilience of health systems — both essential to accelerating and sustaining progress towards health-related SDGs, and to ensuring that health and care systems are future-ready and prepared for emerging challenges.

This goal emphasizes the need for a fundamental shift in approach — one centred on prevention and focused on continuity of services and interventions across the human life-course: from prevention and health promotion, to public-health protection and delivery of essential services, followed by treatment, rehabilitation, and palliative care.

The goal also recognizes the cross-cutting role of gender as a determinant of health and calls for removing the barriers to achieving gender equality, equity, and the right to health for all.

It reflects the transformative potential of the primary-health-care approach to strengthen the core capacities of health systems as the foundation for all aspects of GPW 14.
It also highlights efforts to enhance countries’ abilities to achieve measurable results and the crucial role of non-health sectors in creating health and well-being — particularly through addressing the determinants of health, the root causes of diseases, and health inequities.

Achieving this comprehensive goal requires WHO to fully realize its catalytic, coordinating, and convening roles in global health.

Six strategic objectives underpin the overall goal of GPW 14.
These objectives define the priority areas for collective action to advance health and well-being at national, regional, and global levels.

They reflect major emerging threats to health, essential health-related work and the SDGs, Member States’ priorities, and stakeholders’ areas of focus.

While all strategic objectives support the overall goal of GPW 14, each aligns with a specific aspect — promote, deliver, or protect — to:

• create a structured framework,
• ensure continuity and relevance between GPW 14, GPW 13, and the Triple-Billion targets, and
• facilitate measurement of impact.

Accordingly:

To Promote Health:

a. Responding to climate change as one of the fastest-growing threats to health in the 21st century.
b. Addressing the determinants of health and the root causes of diseases through their integration into key multisectoral policies.

To Deliver Health:

a. Advancing the primary-health-care approach and strengthening core health-system capacities to achieve universal health coverage.
b. Rapidly detecting risks and delivering an effective and sustainable response to all health emergencies.