A Global Agenda for 2025–2028: Promoting, Delivering, and Protecting Health «Part Thirteen»

Implementing a Shared Agenda for Global Health Over the Four-Year Period 2025–2028

Consultations with Member States, partners, and key stakeholders identified five recurring thematic priorities that are central to the success of a shared agenda in achieving measurable impact on global health and well-being over the four-year period from 2025 to 2028, including in relation to the health-related Sustainable Development Goals. These themes either reflect key implementation approaches widely considered essential for achieving the objectives of GPW 14 (such as primary health care and strengthened partnerships) or reaffirm existing national and international commitments and priorities to advance equitable access to health services (such as gender equality, health equity, and the right to health).

Together, these themes constitute the core principles for achieving the anticipated impact of GPW 14 and are as follows:

(a) Expanding the primary health care approach to advance both universal health coverage and health security, by promoting equitable, affordable, integrated, and people-centred care, particularly for underserved populations and people living in vulnerable or marginalized situations, including in emergencies and fragile settings;

(b) Respecting national leadership and empowering governance structures, processes, and capacities to ensure coordination among the large number of health and health-related actors at national, regional, and global levels, across both public and non-State actors, from international agencies to local civil society organizations;

(c) Maintaining an unwavering focus on delivering measurable country-level impact, using approaches that strengthen programmatic accountability and institutionalize a culture and practice of monitoring progress against indicators and targets, fully integrated and aligned with national priorities;

(d) Advancing gender equality, health equity, and the right to health to overcome barriers to health and well-being for all, by ensuring that relevant actions are embedded across all GPW 14 outcomes, particularly in the areas of health leadership and advocacy, programme planning and implementation, data and measurement, reporting, and workforce policies and practices;

(e) Strengthening and expanding partnerships, community engagement, and multisectoral collaboration at national, regional, and global levels to improve global health governance, policy coherence, and collective action among all health-related actors, including international organizations, civil society, youth, WHO collaborating centres, the private sector, parliamentarians, donors and philanthropic organizations, Indigenous peoples, and academia.

The combination of these principles and approaches forms the core of the broader theory of change underpinning GPW 14, as outlined below.

GPW 14 Theory of Change

Achieving the shared outcomes of GPW 14 requires collective action by Member States, the WHO Secretariat, partners, and key stakeholders. The overarching theory of change (see Figure 3 below) explains at the strategic level how the work and unique role of the Secretariat will contribute to that collective action to realize the outcomes, strategic objectives, and impacts of GPW 14.

The theory of change summarizes:
(a) the problems that GPW 14 seeks to address (i.e. the problem statement; see Section 1 above);
(b) the principles and approaches guiding the strategy, as reflected in the shared themes identified through the consultation process;
(c) WHO’s pathways of change, aligned with the Organization’s core functions, the strategic shifts of GPW 13, and the organizational outcomes of GPW 14, to facilitate progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (see Section 3 below); and
(d) the critical actions that Member States, partners, and key stakeholders must take to achieve the strategic objectives and shared outcomes of GPW 14.

The foundation of this theory of change and the joint realization of GPW 14 outcomes—particularly in the challenging context of 2025–2028—requires an enabling environment that aligns commitments, interventions, actions, financing, and key institutions with this global health agenda. In this context, collective action by Member States, partners, and key stakeholders is required across four main areas, including:

(a) Reaffirming commitments to health and well-being and to internationally agreed goals, such as the health-related Sustainable Development Goals, including disease control, elimination, and eradication targets, and monitoring these commitments at the highest political and organizational levels to ensure coherence and the highest level of support for this four-year global health agenda.