by Valerie Boulet, Chief Development Officer, WHO Foundation
A theme of this year’s World Economic Forum meeting in Davos is how can we better invest in people, how do we work together to create a workforce adapted to today’s world, of changing jobs, of AI and of shifts and shocks in geopolitics? One truth remains constant beneath all that change. A resilient economy depends on healthy people.
Health is often invisible when it is good and transformative when it fails. It is a human right, but it is also an economic input. Sick workers are unproductive ones. Care responsibilities, which still fall disproportionately on women, limit their ability to earn, start businesses or contribute fully to the economy.
Healthy outcomes
The World Bank estimates that 1 dollar spent on nutrition returns 23 dollars in economic returns. WHO estimates the return on $1 dollar of health investment is 35 dollars. Effective HIV treatment has kept millions of young people in work. Averting infectious disease outbreaks through better surveillance avoids massive GDP losses. COVID-19 caused trillions in global economic damage whereas investing in emergency preparedness costs a fraction of that. In low-income countries, each job within the health sector generates an estimated 3.4 additional jobs across related industries. Many higher income countries are grappling with the cost of long-term disability, obesity and a population that’s growing older.
All this bears repeating after a year of deep cuts to global health funding. The World Economic Forum estimates an annual funding gap of $10.5bn. WHO surveys from more than 100 low- and middle-income countries in March 2025 suggest that cuts have reduced maternal care, vaccination, emergency preparedness and disease surveillance by up to 70% in some places. Afghanistan alone reportedly closed 400 health centres in 2025. More than 50 countries have lost health and care workers and seen training programmes disrupted.
Closing the gap
Closing these gaps requires scale and coordination. Our role at the WHO Foundation is to raise funding for health and the World Health Organization from business and philanthropic contributors. As the only global health institution with universal reach, WHO operates across countries, regions, and systems, enabling population-level change that no other organisation can replicate.
The WHO Foundation exists to unlock and amplify this scale for donors. It acts as a convener and bridge between WHO and the private sector, philanthropies, and foundations, enabling WHO to move faster, act more flexibly, and engage in deeper collaboration.
Much of the innovation, from diagnostics to vaccines comes from the private sector, often catalysed by governments and philanthropy. These partnerships are proven and time-tested.These collaborations are time-tested. Philanthropic vision and resources are critical for catalyzing health innovations. Philanthropic capital can catalyse breakthroughs that markets alone will not deliver, as malaria vaccines and mRNA research attest.
Long-term system change
A central theme of our conversations with both business and philanthropic donors is aligning their ambitions with WHO’s strategic priorities ensuring investments contribute to long-term system change rather than isolated projects. Of course we need (and we have) guardrails to ensure that no one company or philanthropist has undue influence over a health authority like WHO and that investments in health are evidence-based. We need independent science to remain independent. In doing so, it will produce the evidence necessary and give us sometimes uncomfortable truths about the realities of the world’s health.
Last year we raised 60 million US dollars for the work of WHO in multi-year pledges. This is a fraction of the 10 billion needed to plug gaps in the world’s health needs, in fact it’s a fraction of the World Health Organization’s 2026-27 budget of USD$4.2 billion. Nevertheless we celebrate every win by ringing a bell (an actual Swiss cowbell) in our office. I’m under no illusion about the effort, the painstaking negotiations involved. Raising funding can be slow work.
I also know that every new collaboration brings in stakeholders, intelligence and commitment to building a healthier world. By convening governments, civil society, academia, and the private sector, the Foundation is playing its part in reducing fragmentation in global health and enables collective action to meet challenges that no single actor can solve alone.
For that, I am happy to ring the bell.
Valerie Boulet is the WHO Foundation's Chief Development Officer. Connect with Valerie on LinkedIn.
