The World Health Organization’s global health agenda for the current period centers on six strategic objectives laid out in its Fourteenth General Programme of Work, covering 2025 through 2028. These objectives range from expanding universal health coverage to preparing for the next pandemic, and they’re backed by a approved biennial budget of $6.83 billion for 2024-2025. Here’s what the agenda actually includes and where progress stands.
The Six Strategic Objectives for 2025-2028
WHO’s current strategic framework, known as GPW 14, organizes the organization’s work around six priorities:
- Climate and health: Responding to climate change as a defining health threat of this century.
- Root causes of illness: Addressing the social, economic, and environmental factors that drive poor health across sectors.
- Primary health care: Advancing essential health system capacities needed for universal health coverage.
- Equity and financial protection: Improving service coverage while tackling inequity and gender inequalities.
- Risk prevention: Preparing for health risks from all types of hazards before they become emergencies.
- Emergency response: Detecting threats rapidly and sustaining effective responses to health emergencies.
These six objectives replaced WHO’s earlier framework and reflect a notable shift. Climate change now sits at the top of the list, a position it didn’t hold in previous planning cycles. The emphasis on root causes of illness also signals a broader view of health that extends well beyond hospitals and clinics into areas like food policy, housing, and economic development.
The Triple Billion Targets
WHO measures its own performance against three headline targets, each aiming to improve the lives of one billion more people by 2025 compared to 2018. The latest dashboard numbers paint a mixed picture.
The healthier populations target is closest to being met. An estimated 1.26 billion more people are expected to be enjoying better health and wellbeing by 2023 compared to 2018, and the current trajectory suggests this target will likely be reached by 2025. That said, even hitting this mark won’t be enough to meet the related Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.
Universal health coverage is further behind. About 477 million more people are expected to be covered by essential health services without facing financial hardship by 2023. That’s less than half the billion-person goal, and WHO describes the world as “off track” to meet it.
Health emergencies protection falls in between, with roughly 690 million more people expected to be better protected from health emergencies by 2023. Progress here is also not on pace to reach the billion target by 2025.
Pandemic Preparedness and the Pandemic Agreement
One of the most consequential pieces of WHO’s current agenda is the negotiation of a new international pandemic agreement. Countries have been working since 2021 to draft a legally binding treaty designed to prevent a repeat of the coordination failures seen during COVID-19.
As of late 2024, negotiators have made progress on key areas including research and development systems, supply chain networks, regulatory strengthening, and a new framework for sharing pathogen samples alongside the benefits that come from them, like vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments. At the World Health Assembly in June 2024, governments committed to completing negotiations within a year.
The agreement draws heavily on the “One Health” concept, which recognizes that human health, animal health, and environmental health are interconnected. This same principle runs through several other parts of WHO’s agenda, from antimicrobial resistance to climate policy.
Non-Communicable Diseases
Chronic conditions like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and respiratory illness account for the majority of deaths worldwide, and WHO’s agenda reflects that weight. The central target is straightforward: reduce premature deaths from non-communicable diseases by one-third by 2030, using 2015 as the baseline. This target is embedded in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
WHO’s implementation roadmap for 2023-2030 has expanded to include oral health, with a goal of achieving universal coverage for oral health services by 2030. Mental health has also been elevated, with its own financing discussions now running alongside broader chronic disease planning. The organization has been pushing for sustainable financing mechanisms specifically for non-communicable diseases and mental health, recognizing that these conditions have historically received less international funding relative to their burden.
Mental Health Targets
WHO’s Comprehensive Mental Health Action Plan, extended through 2030, sets several concrete benchmarks. Service coverage for mental health conditions is supposed to increase by at least half by 2030. Eighty percent of countries should have doubled their number of community-based mental health facilities, and the same share of countries should have integrated mental health into primary health care. The plan also targets a one-third reduction in the global suicide rate.
These targets reflect a broader shift in how WHO frames mental health. Rather than treating it as a specialty concern, the agenda positions it as something that should be woven into routine primary care, accessible at the community level rather than confined to psychiatric institutions.
Antimicrobial Resistance
Drug-resistant infections represent one of the slower-burning but potentially devastating threats on WHO’s radar. In September 2024, heads of state adopted a political declaration committing to a range of actions using a One Health approach that spans human medicine, agriculture, and the environment.
The commitments include reducing the quantity of antimicrobials used in the global food system, strengthening infection prevention programs in healthcare facilities, expanding national surveillance systems for drug resistance, and ensuring that developing countries have equitable access to antimicrobials, vaccines, and diagnostics. Countries also agreed to promote stewardship programs that encourage appropriate use of antibiotics and to invest in research for new treatments.
In Europe, WHO is piloting the first AMR Accountability Index, a tool designed to measure and compare how well countries are actually following through on these commitments. If it works, it could serve as a model for holding governments accountable in other regions.
Climate Change as a Health Priority
Climate and health has moved from a peripheral concern to a lead priority in WHO’s planning. At COP28 in late 2023, countries signed a declaration committing to build climate-resilient health systems and integrate health considerations into climate policy.
The practical commitments include improving the ability of health systems to anticipate climate-sensitive diseases through better surveillance and early warning systems, developing a “climate-ready” health workforce, and assessing greenhouse gas emissions from health systems themselves. The health sector is a significant source of emissions, and the declaration calls for decarbonization targets and procurement standards for national health systems, including their supply chains.
Financing remains the sticking point. The declaration acknowledges that health actors, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, face major challenges accessing money for climate-health work. It calls on multilateral development banks, climate funds, philanthropies, and private sector actors to scale up investments, and for international finance providers to better align their climate and health portfolios. Whether this translates into actual funding flows will largely determine how much of this agenda gets implemented.
Equity Across the Agenda
A thread running through nearly every component of WHO’s current agenda is the gap between high-income and low-income countries. The pandemic agreement negotiations have been shaped by tensions over equitable access to vaccines and treatments. The antimicrobial resistance declaration specifically names the needs of developing countries. The climate-health financing discussions center on the reality that the countries most affected by climate-related health threats have the least capacity to respond.
WHO’s own financial structure plays into this. With a total approved budget of $6.83 billion for 2024-2025, the organization relies heavily on voluntary contributions from member states and private donors, which come with conditions attached. Efforts to increase assessed contributions, the mandatory dues that give WHO more flexibility in how it spends, have been a recurring theme in governance discussions. How the organization is funded shapes what it can prioritize and how independently it can act on its stated agenda.