The humanitarian financing model is at an inflection point. Shifting aid budgets, debt pressures, and
geopolitical competition are prompting a long-overdue conversation about how the system is funded and
governed. Encouragingly, many Global South countries now finance more of their own healthcare than ever
before — a sign of growing capacity and ownership. The task ahead is to ensure decision-making power
evolves in step, so that priorities are shaped by equitable need and shared responsibility rather than political
visibility alone. The panel explores the growing role that wealthier Global South economies — Gulf states,
India, China, Singapore — can play in humanitarian governance, and what would make fuller participation
attractive and meaningful. The opportunity at stake is significant: a broader, more representative table for
setting priorities, and a future architecture of sovereignty, financing, and governance built by and for a wider
community of actors.
Health and humanitarian systems are powered by women’s labor — as doctors, nurses, community health
workers, and caregivers. This is one of the sector’s greatest strengths, and its fullest potential is yet to be
realized: women remain underrepresented in leadership and decision-making, and their work is too often
framed as service or sacrifice rather than the skilled, political labor it is. India’s ASHA workers, for instance,
proved indispensable during COVID-19 — a powerful demonstration of what community health leadership can
achieve, and a compelling case for the recognition and investment that should follow. Expanding access to
education and public participation, including in contexts such as Afghanistan, is central to strengthening the
long-term resilience of the systems women sustain. The panel examines the political economy of care work
and asks how humanitarian and health systems can harness this expertise fully: who defines priorities, whose
knowledge counts, and what more equitable models of leadership and labor look like in practice.
COVID-19 made clear that access to medicines, diagnostics, and vaccines is a political choice as much as a
scientific one — and, equally, that political choices can widen access dramatically when solidarity leads. This
recognition has moved health sovereignty to the center of global health debates, understood not as isolation
or self-sufficiency but as the capacity to cooperate, share knowledge, and build regional manufacturing while
staying connected to global research and solidarity. Traditional South–South solidarity, rooted in shared
history, is being renewed and reimagined for a new era of economic dynamism and evolving alliances. This
panel will examine intellectual property, technology transfer, and regional manufacturing, and chart the forms
of international cooperation best placed to support resilient, equitable health systems that are both selfreliant
and outward-looking.
