Founded in 2008 by Ilona Kickbusch, a prominent public intellectual and global health expert, the Global Health Centre (GHC) focuses on research and analysis, strategic convening, and education. Over its first decade, the GHC has strengthened Geneva’s role as a capital of global health. In 2019, Ilona Kickbusch handed over leadership of the Centre to Vinh-Kim Nguyen, emergency physician and medical anthropologist, and Suerie Moon, internationally-recognised policy expert on global governance and health.

Global health is currently at a crossroads, facing acute challenges from a shifting geopolitical order, weakened mulutilateralism, and the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as chronic challenges such as climate change, economic inequality, migration, and armed conflicts.

The Centre aims to open global health to diverse voices, knowledge and ideas, and engage critically with issues of governance, politics and power. It offers a unique meeting place for scholars and practitioners in Geneva and far beyond.

The Centre actively promote collaboration that bridges Global North/South divides; within academia and beyond, bringing in governments, civil society, journalists, the private sector, and other stakeholders, to discuss and tackle global health challenges. The Centre pays special attention to geopolitics, concerns of transparency and accountability, the impact of (neo)colonialism on global health, and populations often excluded from governance. In 2020-24 the Centre’s work will focus on five themes, while promoting collaboration across them in response to fast-changing events:

• Technological innovation, access and finance
• Outbreaks and epidemics
• Global digital futures
• Intimacy, sexuality and autonomy
• Law, protection and control