New Report:
Embedding One Health into the Global Health Architecture
The One Health Summit, a flagship event of the French G7 Presidency, brings together Heads of state and government for the first time around a shared ambition: to make the One Health approach — which inseparably links human, animal, and environmental health — a guiding compass for the development of national, regional, and global public health policies.
The report « Embedding One Health into the Global Health Architecture – Overview, Challenges and Relevance of the Global Fund » report examines how the ongoing reform of the global health architecture could lastingly anchor this approach in prevention policies and crisis response. It traces the emergence of the One Health agenda at the international level, driven by groups of scientific and institutional experts, through to its inscription in public international law with the adoption by the World Health Assembly of the Pandemic Treaty. It provides an overview of the progressive integration of the One Health approach into international and regional global health forums and roadmaps, and examines its limitations. It underlines that this ambition comes at a cost: building a multisectoral approach to pandemic risk prevention requires massive structural investments and sustainable resources, at a time when the health systems of low- and middle-income countries are already insufficiently funded to address immediate public health emergencies, and official development assistance is declining sharply.
The report also examines the extent to which the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria can serve as an effective instrument to support low- and middle-income countries in concretely implementing the One Health approach. As the leading multilateral funder of health systems, with $6 billion invested between 2023 and 2025, the Global Fund was deliberately designed not as a new agency with its own operational capacities, but as an unprecedented partnership bringing together governments, multilateral organisations, the private sector, civil society, and communities directly affected by disease. Its mandate to combat AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria makes it one of the leading multilateral investors in the fight against antimicrobial resistance, laboratories, and surveillance and information systems, access to innovations, human resources for health, and community health systems — all of which are essential components of an operational One Health architecture. Going forward, the Global Fund’s role in this agenda will hinge on country-level demand for One Health interventions, in light of available financing: resources mobilised by the Global Fund have fallen from $15.7 billion to $12.64 billion for the next three years, with a French contribution that has yet to be announced but could be reduced by 58%.
The One Health approach is a pillar of both French and European global health strategies. The influence of France, co-chair of the INB, and of European Union member states, represented by the Commission, was decisive in the negotiations that led to the integration of the One Health agenda. In a spirit of coherence, only a strong political — and above all financial — commitment from France and Team Europe, articulated around a reformed vision of the global health architecture that places this renewed model of multilateralism at its core, will make the One Health agenda a reality in low- and middle-income countries as well.