By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Global Leaders Network event took place during the 81st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA 81) on September 22, 2026, to protect essential health funding for women, children, and adolescents amid a severe global financial crisis.
South Africa has called for stronger protection of financing for women, children and adolescents’ health, warning that shrinking development assistance, rising debt burdens and limited fiscal space are threatening hard-won gains in global health.
The minister of International Relations Ronald Lamola said the global health financing environment has become increasingly difficult, with official development assistance falling by just over 23% in 2025.
He said the decline has placed additional pressure on procurement systems and health workforces in low- and middle-income countries, undermining efforts to ensure equitable access to essential maternal and child health commodities.
“Rising debt burdens and shrinking fiscal space make it harder for countries to adjust to the sudden cuts in official development assistance,” he said.
Lamola pointed to the scale of the wider financing challenge, noting that more than 3.3 billion people now live in countries that spend more on interest payments than on schools and hospitals, with more than 750 million of them in Africa.
Against this backdrop, he said the Global Leaders Network (GLN) members – Liberia, Kenya, Sierra Leone and South Africa – have pursued an action-oriented agenda focused on closing financing gaps, protecting existing gains and keeping health-related Sustainable Development Goals accelerators alive.
This includes a six-part webinar series on domestic resource mobilisation, which brought together more than 900 participants from over 40 countries, including Ministries of Health and Finance, development finance institutions, the private sector, academia and civil society.
The discussions, he said, demonstrate that countries are willing to explore new approaches to health financing.
“We were blown away by the innovations so many of our members had already implemented,” Lamola said.
World Health Organisation Director-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told the gathering that global progress in maternal and child health needs to be protected, noting that maternal mortality has fallen by 40% over the past 25 years, while child mortality has more than halved.
However, he warned that progress has slowed and that preventable deaths continue to occur at an unacceptable scale.
“We meet in a time of austerity, but austerity is not an excuse. It’s a test. A policy without a budget is a press release. A commitment without financing is a promise already broken,” Ghebreyesus said.
He called on leaders to protect health spending during periods of fiscal pressure, saying women, children and adolescents should not be first to bear the consequences of funding cuts.
He also called for financing for sexual and reproductive health services, particularly in humanitarian settings, and urged governments and partners to demonstrate progress through measurable results.