I was an intern at the World Health Organisation in 2014, convinced that global health was where change happened. I returned to it in 2025 as an IHP/EV Resident at the International Health Policies (IHP) network and blog hosted at the Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM) in Antwerp, Belgium. The residency lasted three months. What it left behind...

Attention for the climate-health nexus is steadily increasing. Recent global initiatives, including the WHO Global Action Plan on Climate Change and Health, emphasize that climate action must become integral to health strategies. On 20 May, the UN General Assembly turned the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion into tangible polit...

The 79th World Health Assembly (WHA) convened in Geneva against a backdrop of the Declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), a global health financing crisis, geopolitical fracture, and urgent calls for systemic reform. This article surveys the key decisions and debates — and asks whether the WHA’s outcomes will...

Globally, an estimated 1.8 billion women, girls, and people menstruate. Yet despite the scale and universality of menstruation, menstrual health remains marginal within global health policy and financing architectures. Too often, it continues to be framed narrowly through product provision and hygiene management, rather than recognised as a syst...

Attending the World Health Assembly (WHA) for the first time was both exciting and intimidating. I arrived in Geneva with two clear missions: absorb as much information as possible and meet as many people as possible. Luckily, I had colleague Rachel Hammonds as my unofficial WHA mentor: part survival coach, part insider guide, and part private t...

Just before WHA79, IHP editor Kristof Decoster spoke with Jocalyn Clark, international editor of The BMJ, for her new article on the campaign for next Director-General of WHO, which has just kicked off. They had a broader discussion than was able to be included in the BMJ article. Here, we publish a fuller Q&A between these two editors who discu...

In March 2026, India amended its Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, a law that governs how transgender people are legally recognised by the state. What unsettled me the most about it was how easily it changed and how little time it took to do so. There was criticism, there were protests, there were warnings from activists. And yet t...

There is considerable interest in reforming global health governance with a plethora of recent reform proposals from actors such as the Wellcome Trust and Health Architecture Reimagined (HEAR). Moreover, in the aftermath of Covid-19 there have been numerous recommendations issued from a wide variety of multilateral and non-governmental actors su...

When we picture a victim of domestic violence in India, the image that often surfaces is that of a woman, reflecting the well-documented reality that women disproportionately experience such violence. Sadly, it’s thus an accurate picture. However, this should not obscure the fact that men, too, can be victims of domestic abuse, with often litt...