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- Shaping the global conversation on health
G20 India
Stéphanie Seydoux at the G20 Health Working Group, under India presidency, in June 2023.
© Credits
In the face of the shifting global health landscape, and during a time of ambitious transformation, WHO has gone from the sidelines of international political events to being a key player, shaping the global conversation on public health. Stéphanie Seydoux, the WHO Director-General's Envoy for Multilateral Affairs since 2022, and her team spearhead this work in advocating evidence- and rights-based solutions in global health.
Ms Seydoux, a former French Ambassador for Global Health, leads advocacy and negotiations in multilateral and intergovernmental settings, particularly for high-level political meetings. Although the focus of her team is outward-facing, as she discusses her work it becomes clear that the impact is just as great inside the Organization.
The Office of the Director-General’s Envoy for Multilateral Affairs (EMA) was created in March 2019 as a critical element of WHO’s Transformation Agenda. Ms Seydoux explains that her role “with a small team which constitutes the office, is to support engagement at the highest level of the Organization with political, high-level fora which have a broader political remit, to ensure health is high on the international agenda.” The EMA team coordinates more than 15 multilateral engagements, prioritizing global events like the Group of Seven (G7) and Group of Twenty (G20) meetings, as well as meetings of the Commonwealth, the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, and key regional political bodies, while engaging in others with a light touch.
The aim of each engagement is the same: to strengthen WHO’s health diplomacy and ensure health is considered as an integral part of all significant global issues.
Health is a political choice, Ms Seydoux highlights. WHO helps country representatives like ministers of health to reinforce their positions, driving progress towards universal health coverage and Sustainable Development Goal 3, which is "To ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages." While ensuring that health stays on the agenda, the EMA team is also tasked with promoting different key WHO objectives each year. For 2024 that means supporting negotiations toward a pandemic agreement, and WHO’s first ever Investment Round to encourage donor contributions and ensure its success.
ANTARA FOTO/Media Centre G20 Indonesia/Fikri Yusuf/nym
On 14 November 2022, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus with Industry Minister Agus Gumiwang Kartasasmita upon arrival in Bali to attend the G20 Summit.
© Credits
It is not an easy job balancing focused advocacy on key health issues with broader multilateral engagement objectives, and health is just one of many topics on the agenda of the world’s largest political gatherings. WHO has garnered significant visibility around global health issues since 2019, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is not a given that all governments will prioritize health. The challenge now for Ms Seydoux and the EMA team is to ensure that this attention doesn’t wane.
“Dr Tedros is now a permanent guest of these organizations,” says Ms Seydoux. “I think what has really worked is the strength of the message. What we’re trying to do is to be very clear on a number of strong, strategic asks.”
To promote these asks, and WHO’s main objectives, it is essential to showcase how the Organization can support the international community in working towards access to health for all. Ms Seydoux and her team follow the thematic priorities of the presidencies of different forums, making linkages between health and other global challenges such as climate change and the expansion of artificial intelligence. They then support these priorities by curating advice and expertise from the different areas of WHO. The inherent need to present a coordinated front has also helped to drive increased collaboration internally, serving to break down siloes within the Organization. Ms Seydoux sees the work EMA does as a space for working horizontally, in which pragmatic questions can be asked and staff can bring different work threads together to form cohesive, organization-wide positions on pressing issues.
“Very concretely, that involves a particular kind of work for us in this small office, which is to reach out to colleagues across the Organization to ensure that everyone who needs to be involved is actually mobilized to try to help in that direction. We find that there’s a wonderful opportunity for internal coordination within WHO, at headquarters level, but also at regional and country level.”
Stéphanie Seydoux, WHO Director-General's Envoy for Multilateral Affairs
© WHO / Pierre Albouy
On 24 May 2023, Dr Mansukh Mandaviya, Minister of Health and Family Welfare of India, met with Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to discussed WHO's partnership with India on traditional medicine and ongoing G20 work.
© Credits
As in the overall transformation of WHO, the task of the EMA team is to work more horizontally, bringing teams together to produce strategic and outcome-oriented work. WHO’s engagement in multilateral affairs is shifting to ensure internal coherence in health diplomacy engagement and to reach out with clearer narratives and more consolidated, strategic asks. This increased engagement has undoubtably raised the advancement of health on the agenda of numerous high-level fora. Moving forward, the Fourteenth WHO General Programme of Work will outline stories of how the global health ecosystem is evolving in an increasingly complex world, and how WHO is evolving to meet emerging challenges and will continue working towards health for all. Ms Seydoux believes this is crucial: “The better we are able to build those narratives, the better we will be able to reach the political level and make the demonstration that health is technical but also a political choice.”
