Executive Summary
This new Global Health Strategy, the Fourteenth General Programme of Work of the World Health Organization (WHO) for 2025–2028, presents an ambitious plan to bring the world back on track toward achieving the health-related Sustainable Development Goals, while advancing health equity and strengthening the resilience of health systems in our increasingly stressed world.

This programme is grounded in WHO’s mission to promote, provide, and protect health and well-being for all people, and is also based on WHO’s legal commitment to gender equality, universality, and human rights.
This new strategy includes six strategic objectives that respond to major health challenges and crises of our time (see Figure 1):

• Addressing health risks linked to rapid climate change;

• Preventing disease through joint action on the determinants of health;

• Advancing primary health care and essential health system capacities to accelerate progress toward shared goals and universal health coverage;

• Improving health service coverage and financial protection;

• Strengthening the prevention, preparedness, and response to health crises.

What is new in this Global Health Strategy (GPW 14)?

Based on the evaluation of the Thirteenth General Programme of Work (2019–2025), the 2023 Global Universal Health Coverage Monitoring Report, and lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, GPW 14 includes:

• Defining a global health agenda for the WHO Secretariat and its 194 Member States, along with the Organization’s partners;

• Presenting a comprehensive “theory of change” showing how WHO enables the collective actions needed to achieve the strategic goals and outcomes of GPW 14;

• Identifying priority focus areas reflected in six strategic objectives and fifteen shared outcomes;

• Providing an improved results framework with recalibrated measurement indicators, updated outcome indicators, and “corporate results” that highlight WHO’s specific contributions;

• Emphasizing the creation of stronger data infrastructures and digital systems within WHO and Member States.

Figure 1. The six strategic objectives of GPW 14

1. Responding to climate change, an increasing threat to health

2. Advancing the primary health care approach and essential health system capacities to achieve universal health coverage

3. Preventing, reducing, and preparing for health risks arising from all threats

4. Addressing the determinants of health and the root causes of diseases

5. Improving health service coverage and financial protection

6. Rapidly detecting and sustaining response to health emergencies