Reimagining Global Health Financing:

Major reductions in development assistance are reshaping how countries fund and sustain essential health services such as immunization, maternal and child health, and primary care. This evolving landscape presents both a crisis and an opportunity: a crisis in terms of ensuring continuity and equity of care amid growing domestic needs, and an opportunity to reimagine how countries prioritize, optimize, and integrate their health systems.

To respond effectively, countries must navigate difficult trade-offs between constrained resources and the need to protect health outcomes. In response to these challenges, the Middle East Council on Global Affairs and the Gates Foundation, with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Education and Higher Education at the State of Qatar, and under the Doha Global South Health Policy Initiative, convened a high-level panel featuring leaders from across the Global South, Qatari institutions, and global partners to explore the future of health financing.

The panel examined key questions, including: How are countries reprioritizing health agendas and adapting delivery models in response to declining external aid? What innovations in service integration, financing mechanisms, or system optimization are enabling countries to deliver more with less? How can Global South countries sustain or even expand essential services in increasingly constrained fiscal environments? What role can new development actors, including Gulf donors and philanthropic organizations, play in shaping the future of global health financing? And what opportunities exist for greater Global South leadership and cross-country collaboration on long-term, sustainable health system reform?