The World Health Organization

            Luckily for us, the Executive Board (EB) of the WHO began the first of their two annual meetings on Monday (the 17^th), the same day as our visit to the organization. The EB is composed of 34 member countries and works together before presenting projects, budgets, and findings to the annual general meetings of all 192 member states. This timing was perfect for us because we were able to watch the WHO Director General, Dr. Margaret Chan, give her speech about the state of global health and the WHO and then stand around the building while surrounded by ministers of health and other higher ups in the global health world. A few members of the group even got a picture with Dr. Chan! I only saw her from a few feet away…In the global health world that’s a big celebrity citing.

            Dr. Chan gave a very interesting and bold speech. She highlighted several encouraging accomplishments in global health over the past year, making sure to highlight the WHO’s role in them at the same time, but at the same time acknowledged to everybody that the WHO is in a somewhat troubled time. In her opinion, the WHO is overextended at the moment and needs reform at all levels. The problems of global health are more complex now, global health is a very crowded landscape, and in order to keep pace the organization needs to change. The WHO needs “an eye for everything, but not a programme for everything,” in her words.

            In addition to Dr. Chan’s speech, we were given an introduction to the WHO, listened to a presentation about the WHO and mental health, another presentation about the WHO’s programme for essential surgery services, and visited the SHOC room, which is used to coordinate emergency responses to natural disasters and epidemic breakouts.

            After visiting the WHO, listening to the different presentations, visiting other NGO’s, and talking with our faculty, my impressions of the WHO are mixed. People are losing confidence in the WHO and the UN as a whole in general. In the global health field, private foundations, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are assuming a larger role as donors give less to the WHO and more to these organizations. The WHO is a sprawling organization and part of the much larger, much more sprawling UN organizational complex. Furthermore, in the past, not all of the donations from the WHO have reached the people they were intended to. Health ministers and other government officials have been known to practice “PNF” – People and Family, which means keep some money from donations and give the rest to the people. Other, private organizations skip the middleman, i.e. the government and give directly to the people, which donors find appealing.

            Dr. Schenker, one of our faculty members, who also used to work for the WHO in their HIV/AIDS program, brought us to “the cages,” a part of the organization that isn’t exactly on the tour schedule. In “the cages,” the org keeps copies of all their publications of research, programmes, etc. Many of these copies stay in the cages, undistributed and unread, printed by expensive Swiss publishing firms. The cages embodied a criticism of the WHO levied by many others, that it produces little more than paper.  

            In this landscape, the WHO has assumed more of a coordinating role rather than working on the ground, but I will be curious to see how much longer it maintains that role and if its influence will continue to shrink.  For some of us, this trip to the WHO was a loss of innocence. Despite the idealism of the WHO’s work, we were exposed to the problems it faces and many of the ways the organization has been corrupted. However, even though there are issues, we were always impressed by the individuals we met. They were all passionate, dedicated professionals who cared deeply for their work. This dichotomy between the individual and the larger organization is a theme that we struggled with, and I’m sure that we’ll see it again this semester. 

 The group outside the WHO

 The group at the WHO inside our presentation room

IHP students with Dr. Chan, Director General of the WHO!!!