What the Global Partnership Conference must deliver in practice: from ambition to architecture

Aparna Barua Adams, Senior Advocacy Advisor, Unlimit Health 

The Global Partnerships Conference (GPC), held in London from 19–20 May, proposed a new model for international cooperation: locally-led, investment-driven, outcome-focused. However, the architecture needed to deliver that model has not been fully built. A key question remains whether institutions can change fast enough to match their own ambitions and rhetoric around equitable, sustainable development. 

Across the two-day conference, one persistent tension was present in multiple discussions: the gap between the ambition of the attendees and the systems required to deliver it. That tension is present in how programmes are funded, how research is governed, and how health systems are, or aren’t, built for resilience. 

The reality remains that donors and investors continue to fund short-term projects. The mindset shift required to support long-term investment in people, institutions, and locally-led innovation, alongside a genuine redistribution of power and decision-making, is still a work in progress.

A call to fund what actually works 

Our work at Unlimit Health spans NTD elimination and integration efforts with a focus on parasitic disease. Through this lens, we are able to work across nutrition, WASH, sexual reproductive health and One Health approaches, areas that sit at the intersection of exactly the kind of partnerships the GPC is seeking to catalyse. 

Take the connection between parasitic worm infections and malnutrition. Schistosomiasis and soil-transmitted helminths can lead to anaemia and stunting through direct biological mechanisms; hookworms cause chronic blood and iron loss; roundworm competes for vitamin A; and chronic inflammation from schistosomiasis impairs childhood growth. These are not background conditions. They are significant drivers of the malnutrition burden that development investment is intended to address. 

Deworming makes iron supplementation more effective. WASH helps to prevent reinfection. Nutrition and growth enable children to recover before stunting becomes permanent. None of this works in silos, yet too often funding structures still operate that way. 

One Health, in practice, means that human, animal and environmental health are understood as interdependent, designed together, funded together. The GPC’s framing of modern partnership should make this kind of integrated, cross-sectoral approach easier to resource. Too often, it doesn’t, because vertical funding streams, siloed ministries and short programme cycles still dominate. 

So, what does genuine partnership require?  

For the conference’s ambitions to translate into positive outcomes, the development sector needs to make some specific changes: 

Fund integration, not just interventions. Deworming campaigns, nutrition programmes, WASH infrastructure and primary healthcare cannot keep operating through separate budgets and disconnected delivery systems. Integrated approaches reduce costs, improve coverage and produce outcomes that outlast individual programmes.  

Invest in health systems, not just health projects. Community health workers delivering NTD interventions, nutrition support and WASH promotion are not volunteer resources, they are essential health system infrastructure. They require sustainable remuneration, supervision and career pathways. 

Make nutrition a trigger, not an afterthought, in anticipatory action. Nutritional deterioration, wasting rates, anaemia trends and stunting data are leading indicators of crisis and health systems stress. They should sit within early warning systems alongside food security and climate data. 

 Apply One Health principles to funding, not just frameworks. The interdependence of human, animal and environmental health is well understood.  Funding structures now need to reflect that reality, particularly for NTDs, zoonotic disease and nutrition-sensitive agriculture. 

Restore and protect Overseas Development Assistance. Private finance and blended instruments have an important role to play but they are not a substitute for public financing in the contexts of conflict-affected populations and extreme poverty.  

There are, however, reasons for optimism. The United Kingdom’s signing of the OECD Guidelines for Supporting Locally Led Development (LLD) Guidelines, alongside the FCDO–Wellcome Trust MOU committing to long-term partnership, both highlighted during the conference, are important institutional signals that show change and efforts to rebuild architecture to deliver on equitable and sustainable development. 

The UK now has an opportunity to carry the momentum of the conference into its G20 presidency. Reflected across multiple conversations last week, it was clear that progress is real, but the question remains whether it is happening fast enough.

Fast enough for the billion people living with parasitic worm infections. Fast enough for the 45 million children affected by wasting. Fast enough for the communities where climate shocks, conflict and disease interact in ways that no single vertical programme can address. 

The GPC helped to define the ambition. Now the institutions need to evolve quickly enough to meet them.