Gates Foundation will spend $2.5 billion to boost women’s health
4/8/2025: The Gates Foundation is committing to spend $2.5 billion over five years to advance more than 40 promising innovations to improve women’s health outcomes. The Foundation is also investing to ensure innovations reach the women who need them, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.
Source: Devex
WHO projects up to 40% cut in health aid in 2025
24/7/2025: Health aid is projected to decline by up to 40% in 2025 compared to 2023 levels, from over $25 billion to around $15 billion, according to estimates from the World Health Organization. The decline is due to significant donor funding cuts from some of the world’s biggest donor countries, including the US. This will hit many low-income countries heavily reliant on external aid for their health budgets.
Source: Devex
New platform aims to end malaria, TB, and dengue in Asia-Pacific
15/7/2025: The Asian Development Bank is working on a new flagship regional initiative to help accelerate the elimination of diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, and dengue, which are resurging in the region. Several countries are seeing a decline in grant funding from global agencies such as the Vaccine Alliance and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS.
Source: Devex
UNAids chief warns that US cuts that will mean millions more deaths
4/7/2025: The head of the global agency tackling Aids says she expects HIV rates to soar and deaths to multiply in the next four years as a direct impact of the “seismic” US cuts to aid spending.
Source: The Guardian
Price of first malaria vaccine to be slashed by more than half
25/6/2025: The price charged by drugmakers Bharat Biotech and GSK for the world’s first malaria vaccine, RTS,S, will be reduced to less than $5 per dose in endemic countries by 2028. In low income countries supported by GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, prices will be cut even further.
Source: Devex
Breakthrough in search for HIV cure leaves researchers ‘overwhelmed’
5/6/2025: A cure for HIV could be a step closer after researchers in Melbourne found a new way to force the virus out of hiding inside human cells. It is based on mRNA technology, which came to prominence during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Source: The Guardian
Trump budget request slashes global health funding
4/6/2025: The Trump administration's 2026 budget request excludes any funding for Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which provides vaccines to lower-income countries. Similar cuts affect the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the UN Population Fund.
Source: Devex
Can domestic financing solve the global health funding crisis?
28/5/2025: In the wake of massive cuts to aid, experts are looking to domestic governments to shore up looming gaps in global health financing. But many governments simply do not have the resources or the ability to cover all of the donor funding that is disappearing.
Source: Devex
New pandemic treaty is a landmark, but flawed
23/5/2025: World Health Organization member countries have adopted a new treaty to improve international coordination and cooperation on the response to future pandemics. The agreement has the potential to reduce rising global health inequalities but it still falls far short of addressing the human rights violations that occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Source: Human Rights Warch
Increases in vaccine-preventable disease threaten years of progress
24/4/2025: Outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles, meningitis and yellow fever are rising globally as misinformation, population growth, humanitarian crises and funding cuts jeopardize progress. UN agencies are calling for action to protect the reduction in child mortality achieved over the past 50 years.
Source: World Health Organization