WHO Sets Path For Completing Rules Of Engagement With Industry, Foundations

The World Health Organization Executive Board has set a way forward from now to the annual May World Health Assembly for addressing the sensitive issue of drafting a framework for engagement with “non-state actors,” such as industry, foundations, academics and other non-governmental stakeholders.

Under the draft decision EB136/CONF./5 Rev.1 [pdf], the focus for drafting the framework moves solely to the WHO member states. A WHO source said the decision had been adopted.

The 136^th WHO Executive Board is meeting from 26 January to 3 February.

Under the plan, governments should submit any proposals by 16 February, which will be compiled by the secretariat by 9 March. The proposals will be discussed at an intergovernmental meeting from 30 March to 1 April. And a revised version of the framework will be sent on to the May Assembly through the Program, Budget and Administration committee.

Industry and other stakeholders during this Board meeting in closely following the negotiations on the non-state actor framework. The process from here essentially sidelines them and puts the issue in the hands of member governments. But surely stakeholders will continue to closely follow it.

In recent years, WHO’s funding crisis and effectiveness concerns have led it to conduct a reform process and to take on more funding from outside groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But the member state-driven UN agency has been working to craft clearer rules of engagement with such actors.

Specifically in the new decision, the Board agreed to invite member states to “submit to the Director-General specific proposals for amendments, inclusions or deletion of text from the draft overarching framework of engagement with non-State actors and the four specific policies contained in the annex of EB136/5 by 16 February 2015.”

The 39-page EB136/5 [pdf], is a report by the secretariat extensive detailing negotiations on a framework of engagement with non-state actors, with policies on non-governmental organisations, private sector, philanthropic foundations, and academic institutions.

After the 16 February deadline for proposals, this week’s decision requests the WHO director-general to:

“(1) Compile these proposals and to make them available to Member States by 9 March 2015;

(2) convene an open-ended intergovernmental meeting from 30 March to 1 April 2015 with a view to discussing the textual proposals submitted by Member States;

(3) submit, based on the outcome of the above intergovernmental meeting, a revised version of the Framework of Engagement with non-State actors to the Sixty-eighth World Health Assembly through the Programme, Budget and Administration Committee.”