WHO’s Humanitarian Shortfall Exposes the Fraud of Global Health Solidarity -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Over 36 health emergencies in conflict zones, disaster areas and collapsing humanitarian settings are before the World Health Organization. But the institution meant to help millions survive is starving for funds. If that contradiction sounds vulgar, it is because it is.

Global leadership adores the jargon of solidarity. At summits they invoke it, at bouts of concern repeat it and in charters their members never plan to honor etch it. But when it comes to pay for emergency health relief of peoples globally besieged by armed conflict, forced displacement and hunger disease and state failure solidarity evaporates into donor fatigue political grandstanding bureaucratic cowardice.

This is more than just a budget problem. It is a moral indictment.

The consequences of not funding the WHO emergency budget are, by contrast, real-world. Clinics shut down. Vaccination campaigns stall. Disease surveillance weakens. Malnourished children go untreated. Cholera spreads faster. Maternal care collapses. Trauma service evaporate where bombs continue to fall. Rampart/Tim Peak In humanitarian emergencies, financing delayed is not administrative inconvenience. It is an organ of avoidable mortality.

And yet the world acts as though WHO’s emergency arm should be powered by applause. Governments say they need preparedness, resilience and rapid response as well as universal protection but deny the funding that would make such pledges real. They want the architecture of global health security to stand while they silently take out its load-bearing walls.

The hypocrisy is staggering. The same international system that can come up with trillions for military build-up, border enforcement warfare on the working class (and secure debt repayment) and shit loads of cash to keep bazillionaires in power suddenly becomes fiscally namby-pamby once it comes time deliver what is needed to simply let people who are realising billions a year in profit live. Deterrence, containment and war are paid for no matter how many other priorities the project threatens. Sometimes, there is not enough oxygen or vaccines and clean water; always less of field hospitals and frontline workers.

It exposes a cruel value hierarchy. Some crises get funded because they pose a threat to markets, borders or strategic interests. The others like the ones that cater to humans at their weakest, those who are poor and expendable in nature, as well are politically dispensable have such companies been ignored. The WHO humanitarian shortfall is no mere accounting accident. It is the cash value of whose suffering matters, and who gets to suffer through neglect.

Remarkably, the need for ongoing funding of emergency health response highlights the hollowness of post-COVID rhetoric. The world promised never again. There would never be a spoiler alert ever! We would never again turn a blind eye to the fragility of systems until collapse was posing an existential threat. Its hallmark would be a firm resolve to thwart nationalism and short-termism from undermining international cooperation ever again. But here we are again: applauding preparedness while gutting the agencies that are supposed to do it.

The uniqueness of this failure is that emergencies are no more just localised for long. Conflict, displacement, malnutrition, epidemic outbreaks and shocks related to climate change or the collapse of healthcare systems have no respect for borders. The WHO underfunded in one region does not contain instability; it welcomes instability. Nine years ago, we would pay an enormous delay in any other intervention today with a high toll on the lost lives and money which escalates tomorrow.

Even this argument, however, should not need to be made. No one fleeing and trapped in Sudan, Gaza, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan or Yemen – indeed any other emergency setting at this time should have to justify their strategic value before the world decides they are worthy enough for bare minimum protection from disease. Survival cannot be contingent on the whim of donors.

Global health solidarity means nothing unless it is measurable in timeliness, flexibility and adequacy of emergency financing. Not slogans. Not commemorative speeches. Not annual expressions of concern. Real cash, before the systems tumble (not after the TV cameras roll).

Here is this unflattering truth: Unaccustomed as we are to wisdom, the world has no issue with a deficit of solidarity because it lacks beautiful words. It suffers a solidarity deficit because too many large governments have opted for compassion performance over action cost

So let us call a spade when we see it. Then, there was the humanitarian funding gap for WHO. This fact is proof that the global community has constructed a moral lexicon it will not fund. In principle, it is a celebration of global health; in practice, an abject abdication.

That is not solidarity. It is fraud.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya Indonesia