World Health Organisation (WHO) members agreed on May 31 to strengthen the UN body and give it a more secure financial base.

Many of the details of the concrete measures had to be left to a future date, as members resist moves to hand more power and independence to the global health body for fear it might encroach on their sovereignty.

But WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus hailed the resolution passed on the last day of the UN health agency’s annual meeting of its 194 member states as “historic”, saying: “The world needs a stronger WHO at the centre of the global health architecture.”

A year and a half after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic that has killed more than 3.5 million people, member states on May 21 agreed to adopt a 14-page resolution that vows, among other things, to remove the uncertainty around the organisation’s funding.

Member states committed to “ensure the adequate, flexible, sustainable and predictable financing of WHO’s programme budget”.

Tedros pointed out that even in the midst of the crisis, low and uncertain funding levels had meant programmes were being planned “in a debilitating cycle of financial ebb and flow”.

Only about 16 per cent of the agency’s budget currently comes from regular membership fees. The rest comes from voluntary contributions that are heavily earmarked by countries for particular projects.

With May 31’s resolution, countries also agreed to “strengthen WHO’s capacity to rapidly and appropriately assess disease outbreaks” of possible global concern.

The resolution called on all countries to increase their ability to detect new threats and to communicate such threats effectively at home and abroad.

To ensure all nations do their part, the resolution asked Tedros to consider creating a pilot project in which countries would submit their pandemic preparedness plans to regular peer reviews by other members states – just as they undergo reviews of their rights situations before the UN Human Rights Council.

The resolution stopped short of explicitly backing the experts’ recommendation to hand the WHO broader powers to launch investigations or communicate about health threats without waiting for a green light from the countries concerned.