International solidarity is at a turning point.
The sharp decline in international financing for development and humanitarian action is already having tangible consequences in many countries. Health programmes are being reduced or interrupted, communities are seeing essential services weakened, and local organisations are being asked to respond to growing needs with increasingly limited resources. Behind the figures and budget announcements are people, organisations and communities having to adapt every day to a rapidly changing reality.
This session will start from these realities on the ground and place the voices of those directly affected at the centre of the discussion. What does a sudden contraction in international funding mean for a local organisation, a health facility, a community or a humanitarian actor? What are the consequences for the continuity of care, local capacities, responses to crises and, more broadly, the gains achieved through decades of international cooperation?
At the same time, the session will seek to move beyond a discussion centred solely on crisis and declining funding. If the global health landscape is undergoing profound change, this moment also provides an opportunity to ask a broader question: what could international solidarity look like in the future?
The traditional model of cooperation—largely based on international public financing, relationships between donors and recipients, and programmes often designed through top-down approaches—is increasingly being challenged. At the same time, new forms of cooperation are emerging: stronger local leadership, South-South and regional cooperation, increased domestic resource mobilisation, partnerships between public and private actors, innovative financing mechanisms, knowledge and technology sharing, and more horizontal alliances between institutions, civil society organisations and communities.
How can we turn the current constraints into an opportunity to rethink the way we cooperate? How can we move from a model of solidarity based primarily on the transfer of resources towards one that also emphasises the sharing of responsibilities, knowledge, capacities and decision-making power? How can we better recognise and support local actors, who are often the first to respond to crises and the ones most deeply rooted in their communities? And how can we build partnerships that are more balanced, sustainable and responsive to the realities of different contexts?
Through first-hand perspectives from the field, concrete experiences and dialogue among actors with different roles and perspectives, this session will seek not simply to define what international solidarity should be, but to create space to imagine what it could become.
Because when states step back, the question is not only how to fill the funding gap. It is also about what kind of solidarity we want to build for the future—and with whom.
The objective of this session is to bring the realities and perspectives of frontline actors into the discussion, examine how the decline in international financing is reshaping health and humanitarian action, and explore how international solidarity can be reimagined around more equitable, locally led, sustainable and mutually accountable forms of cooperation.
