Impressions from the World Health Summit 2025: Taking responsibility for health in a fragmenting world

2025-10-23

The World Health Summit (WHS) once again brought together global health leaders and experts from across sectors to “catalyze solutions for pressing health challenges”. As one of the most influential gatherings in global health, the summit aims to be a platform for new new ideas, dialogue, networking and collaborations. Discover impressions and highlights from the conference in the full article.

This year’s theme “Taking Responsibility for Health in a Fragmenting World” was meant to underscore the urgency of collective leadership at a time marked by geopolitical tensions, shrinking development budgets, the climate crisis, misinformation and widening inequalities.

The summit gathered over 4,000 participants in Berlin and more than 40,000 people joining online for discussions over three days, spanning over 85 sessions and more than 60 side events. Key topics included global health governance and financing, the climate and health nexus, artificial intelligence (AI) and digital innovation, equity, as well as women’s and children’s health and the growing burden of noncommunicable diseases.

Transforming the global health governance and financing architecture

Reform of the global health architechture and financing models was a recurrent theme throught the summit and was a central focus of several sessions. While many speakers highlighted the severe consequences of recent aid cuts – by the US, UK, France, Germany, and others – for people’s lives and access to care, discussions largely centered on the opportunity this moment of turmoil presents to reimagine and renew a global health system that is already in great need of transformation.

Many speakers from the Global South highlighted the need to for decreasing donor dependence and increase health sovereignty, while rebuilding global health structures collaboratively. Avenues for how to enhance domestic and innovative financing were explored. The need to strengthen multilateralism and reimagine a more inclusive global health architecture was echoed broadly across government, multilateral agencies, industry and other sector speakers. Also leaders from major global health institutions called for reforming the current health aid system that was described as too fragmented and underfunded, not well adapted to emerging complex challenges and with structural problems often leading to duplications.

Despite widespread agreement on the need for transformation, discussions offered few concrete pathways — a gap that will require urgent attention. What this shift ultimately means for the governance and financing of efforts to address antibiotic resistance is still unclear, but undeniably consequential.

Spotlight on antimicrobial resistance – data gaps, innovation and global health security

Against the backdrop of calls to strengthen global health architecture and financing, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) repeatedly emerged as a crucial reminder of what is at stake. While not a headline theme this year, several sessions underscored AMR as a rising global health security challenge — one that demands both scientific innovation and more accountable governance.

A few sessions addressed AMR as the main topic, primarily with a focus on resesarch and development of new antibiotics. In a session on “Leveraging evidence and tools to advance AMR policy implementation”, speakers discussed persistent data gaps and the underuse of available evidence and tools to inform decision making and evaluation of progress. The potential of leveraging AI to better harness data to support action on antibiotic resistance was explored and echoed in several other sessions. The event “The Future of Antibiotics -Is Global South innovation our best strategy?” hosted by GARDP focused on encouraging developments in innovation emerging from countries such as India, Brazil, South Africa and Thailand. The discussions highlighted the importance of fostering ecosystems that provide sustainable access to antibiotics and diagostics and the presentations brought a welcome note of optimism.

The WHO’s launch of the Global Antimicrobial Resistance and Use Surveillance System (GLASS) report on the second day of the summit cast important spotlight on antibiotic resistance. According to the report, one in six laboratory-confirmed cases of common bacterial infections that cause common infections in people worldwide in 2023 were resistant to antibiotics. Between 2018 and 2023 antibiotic resistance increased in over 40% of pathogen-antibiotic combinations monitored. Several speakers and participants referred to the report and the “growing threat of antibiotic resistance” when speaking in sessions on pandemic preparedness and response and global health security, as evidence for the urgent need to strengthen surveillance, preparedness and enhance global health collaboration through a One Health appraoch.

Community and civil society representation and voices

The summit covered an impressive range of topics, and brought together ministers from 18 countries and participants from 144 countries. Yet, the voices of those whose health was at the center of the discussions were largely absent from the programme. Across sessions, whether on pandemic preparedness and response or governance and financing, many speakers emphasised the vital role of communities, community health workers and civil society in building trust, driving accountability and serving on the frontlines of health responses.

While civil society was included to some extent in the official programme and participation has become increasingly inclusive, the perspectives of those most affected by the recent shocks to the global health system were not prominently featured. Looking ahead, ensuring

Although the summit did include civil society in the offical program to some extent and participation generally is becoming more inclusive, the program did not feature in any prominent way the voices of those most affected by the shocks to the global health system. In future summits and in the next phases of deliberations on transforming the global health architecture and financing models, ensuring that their expertise, needs, and lived experiences and insights are meaningfully represented will be essential.