ReAct 2025 ambitions: increase political will, strengthen civil society engagement and address barriers to access

2025-01-30

With 2024 now behind us with all its elevated attention to antibiotic resistance, 2025 lies in front of us as a fork in the road where action and the momentum from last year’s High Level Meeting, will either continue to grow – or - priorities will have moved on and actions will stagnate. ReAct of course hopes for the first option, but also deems is necessary to be prepared to work hard to prevent that antibiotic resistance does not fall completely off the radar of politicians again.

2025 is the year where ReAct will celebrate its 20 years of action for a world free from untreatable infections. Back in 2005 the network was created to be a catalyst of global action, which is still an important part of our mission. With that in mind we have had the opportunity to reflect both on what has happened during the last 20 years of work, but also what needs to get done in the coming two decades.

In the immediate, ReAct is probably not alone in worrying that we will have to focus much of our efforts on preventing the issue from disappearing of the list of global issues that politicians worldwide will need to address against a backdrop of threadbare international relations and weakened global institutions.

Across the ReAct network we therefore plan to focus our collective efforts in 2025 on engaging and re-engaging the political level in countries and in the regions we are present. One major step forward in 2024 was the commitment at the 4th Global High-level Ministerial Conference on Antimicrobial Resistance to establish a rotating ‘troika system’ for organizing Ministerial meetings every second year with the next one being in Nigeria in 2026. If this troika system is upheld, another Ministerial meeting will be held again in 2028 – one year ahead of the next UNGA High-Level Meeting on AMR planned for 2029. This kind of foresight is unprecedented for our field and allows for far more long-term and strategic planning of actions for actors like ReAct.

Engaging parliamentarians

In the time between now and the next ministerial meetings it is our ambition to increase global political engagement, including by building on our (and others) existing work to engage parliamentarians and other decision makers more systematically across regions to foster a cross-regional network of champions. Such work can also support the creation of an alternative avenues for global collaboration to complement intergovernmental multilateral collaboration. Our annual regional conferences in Africa and Asia will be important meeting places for political actors to connect alongside technical experts and civil society, and to ensure that connections with broader agendas such as the sustainable development goals (SDG’s) are safeguarded.

In the process leading up to, as well as during the week of the High-Level Meeting on AMR in New York last year, it was clear that there has been a significant increase in actors who are engaged compared to 2016, when antibiotic resistance (and AMR more broadly) was last discussed at the UNGA. ReAct, together with partners, launched the global campaign From People to Leaders: Act on AMR NOW! which engaged around 200 communities and civil society groups worldwide on a joint ‘Call for action’ targeting decision makers. Despite these efforts, it was still clear that broader societal engagement is still far from where it needs to be in order to effectively demand more action and hold governments accountable.

Broader societal engagement key

In ReAct’s view, increased and broad societal engagement will be paramount – not just for demanding more action – but also for creating change in communities. Civil society and communities have an important role to play as implementing partners of initiatives, leveraging our power as consumers, and with with our capacity to act across the One health spectrum and bridging the issue to broader social movements. Civil society is also key in expressing and addressing needs of the most vulnerable and under-served populations. ReAct therefore plans to continue our work to engage civil society groups, professional societies and communities as core actors in the global response to manage antibiotic resistance.

Building on existing initiatives

In 2025 ReAct’s longstanding work with youth groups will continue, and we plan to build on the unprecedented community mobilization that was achieved in the “From People to Leaders: Act on AMR NOW!”-campaign. As with other major global challenges, civil society plays a critical role in translating policies to the grassroots level, and can act as a bridge between real-life realities and decision-makers. ReAct will therefore also continue to engage in the Multi-Stakeholder Partnership Platform as one of the central building blocks in the emerging global governance structure.

ReAct takes pride in doing our part to push the global policy discussions forward and expanding narratives by including perspectives from low and middle-income countries and the regions we are located in. Today more people continue to die from lack of access to effective antibiotics than from resistant bacteria – particularly in low-and middle-income countries and improving access to effective antibiotics remains a pressing challenge to tackle.

Sustainable access to effective antibiotics for everyone

In 2024 we were pleased to see that our longstanding mission of “ensuring sustainable access to effective antibiotics for everyone” was indeed adopted by more actors. Even if this particular framing was not included in the Political Declaration as we had hoped for, we are keen to ensure that equitable and sustainable access to effective antibiotic for everyone becomes central to global policy discussions. We plan to engage in research and analysis of more overlooked areas, including for diagnosis and laboratory capacity where improved ‘access’ is critical to improve surveillance, prescription guidelines and, of course, patient care.

Do this together!

All in all, ReAct goes into 2025 with a clear idea vision of what we believe needs to get done, but we are also mindful that a bumpy road may be ahead of us, more so given the current political context and its repercussion to global health. And at the end of the day, we cannot accomplish much alone. Teaming up with others – both new and old partners – will be essential to make the necessary progress. The full ReAct network with presence in Africa, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and Europe, is looking forward to joining forces with others – both locally and globally – to keep moving forward even if bumps and road forks may be coming.