An Executive Briefing with the Announced Candidates for World Health Organization Director-General
Followed by an Interactive Tabletop Exercise on Disease Surveillance Architecture
Timeline:
10:30 AM – 11:30 AM [Executive Briefing]
11:30 AM – 12:30 PM [Networking Lunch]
12:30 – 2:30 PM [Tabletop Exercise]
The window to put forward candidates to lead the World Health Organization (WHO) closes the day after this session. Whoever emerges will inherit a smaller budget, a global health landscape being redrawn around them, and an organization in need of significant reorganization and increased focus. This closed-door briefing asks the candidates to share – in their own words – what they would concretely do: what gets funded, what gets restructured, and what WHO should continue, expand, or stop doing altogether. Co-hosted by Concordia, the Stop TB Partnership, and the United Nations Foundation, the conversation will also turn on what acute outbreaks and long-running epidemics have already revealed about where the global health architecture holds and where it gives way.
The executive briefing is followed by an interactive tabletop exercise hosted by the United Nation Foundation’s Global Health Advocacy team in partnership with RAND. Participants will step outside their day-to-day roles and assume different stakeholder perspectives to navigate and contain a simulated disease outbreak. This perspective-shifting is designed to translate high-level dialogue into a hands-on exploration of the gaps, opportunities, and partnerships necessary to strengthen our collective global health security.
