The WHO Civil Society Commission is a new body launched by the Director-General of the World Health Organization in August 2023. The mandate of the Commission is to strengthen dialogue and foster collaboration between WHO and civil society and to provide advice and recommendations to WHO on its engagement with civil society at global, regional and national levels.

The WHO Civil Society Commission has been set up by the World Health Organization to collect advice and recommendations on issues related to the interaction of WHO with civil society. The Commission is not a separate legal entity but hosted and administered by the WHO Secretariat, and its mandate, setup and modalities of work are based on Terms of Reference drafted and published by WHO.

With the launch of the Commission, the Director-General of the World Health Organization is responding to a series of civil society initiatives that recommended to WHO to explore what can be done to allow civil society organizations engaging with WHO in a better and more meaningful way. The launch of the Commission takes place at a moment when WHO is developing new strategies to engage systematically with key constituencies such as civil society, youth, academia, parliaments and the private sector.

The Commission is set up as a network which aims to have a broad and diverse membership including grassroots community organizations, civil society groups and networks, faith-based organizations, professional groups and patient groups working at global, regional, national and local levels. After an initial call launched by WHO in early 2023, the membership application process remains continuous, with no cut-off date.

The Commission consists of a General Meeting, a Steering Committee and Working Groups. The overall strategic direction and main deliverables for the work of the Commission will be provided by its Steering Committee, which initially includes 21 members appointed by the WHO Secretariat for a term of two years.

To accomplish its mandate, and to contribute to the development of a core set of instruments for improving the interaction between WHO and civil society, the Steering Committee is expected to set up working groups and hold public hearings. The General Meeting of all members of the Commission will take place once a year, to review the annual reports provided by the Steering Committee as well as the proposed work plan for the next year.

The MMI Network is a member (“participant”) of the WHO Civil Society Commission and represented in the Steering Committee (2023-2025) by its Executive Secretary Thomas Schwarz.

Launch of the WHO Civil Society Commission on 24 August 2023

The WHO Civil Society Commission held the inaugural meeting of its Steering Committee on 24 August, in a virtual session. According to a WHO press release published on the same day, the Commission “provides, for the first time, the ability to channel advice and recommendations in a more structured and systematic manner from civil society to WHO on health priorities and related issues. The historical role of civil society organizations (CSO) in bringing about change in public health is well-known. While WHO has a long-standing tradition of working with CSOs, the establishment of the Commission takes the collaboration to a new level.”

The meeting was opened by Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, and brought together the members of the Steering Committee: “We know from our experience in so many areas that listening to and responding to the voices of the communities we serve is essential to properly addressing the health challenges they face. We have set up the WHO Civil Society Commission to bring civil society from different backgrounds together to advise us and work with us so that we can learn from you and be guided by your ideas.”

Steering Committee Co Chairs Lisa Hilmi (CORE Group) and Ravi Ram (Medwise Solutions) shared with the WHO team a preliminary set of priority action fields identified by the emerging Steering Committee in its preparatory sessions, and some suggestions of what the WHO Secretariat and Director-General can contribute to the success of this new body. These suggestions include having regular meetings between the Steering Committee and the DG, the Secretariat providing sufficient financial resources for the Commission work, the DG being an advocate and “enabler” for the WHO CSO Commission, and WHO allowing suffient space for the Commission to work freely. All this was well received by the DG and his team.

“This is an historic opportunity for close collaboration between WHO and CSOs around the world, and we are excited that many organizations will have an active role. We welcome all civil society organizations committed to improve global health to join the WHO CSO Commission and look forward to their engagement and thought leadership for addressing critical health issues.” (Co-Chairs quoted in the WHO press release)

  • Meeting website (WHO) with webcast of opening session: here
  • WHO Press release: here

With the launch of the Commission:
The work only begins – in a tricky environment

The launch of the Civil Society Commission on 24 August marks the end of a long (too long) preparatory process. It started with a “DG Dialogue meeting” on 13 October 2020 when a civil society team included the proposal of setting up a “permanent mechanism for strategically dealing with issues related to WHO and social participation and accountability” in a set of key asks related to the challenge of “WHO, in its own fields of work and related institutional processes and arenas, to consistently deal with civil society engagement as a matter of social participation and accountability”.

“There are two main ingredients to bring this really to a next level: One, you have to put engagement with civil society at the core of the institutional culture of WHO. You know, you have succeeded easily in doing so with making WHO a gender aware organization. It would now be the moment to insert a culture of doing it better with civil society. And then this needs to be set up. The idea of a Commission would be a kind of an interface between civil society, Member States and the Secretariat and the Regions on all what is to be done.” (oral explanations by Thomas Schwarz, MMI Network)

At that dialogue meeting, the WHO Director-General responded to the Commission proposal as follows: “Let us create this mechanism together. Let’s say WHO Civil Society Commission. But what will it look like and how is it going to be running, what are the mechanisms, we can go into details, and we can discuss.”

Since then, the secretariat of the MMI Network was engaged, as a co-convener, in an ad-hoc task group that submitted a concrete outline of a WHO Civil Society Commission to the WHO Secretaria in January 2021, and then in a “Civil Society Interest Group” that continued to push for advancing the Commission project.

Celebrating the launch of the Commission almost three years later, and experiencing ourselves the start of the work of the Commission’s Steering Committee as fruitful and dynamic, with promising perspectives, many might not be aware of the highly sensitive context and background of the Commission proposal,

  • with the difficult and contested pathway from the civil society proposal being agreed by the DG in 2020 to the implementation of the Commission in 2023,
  • the challenges related to the way the Commission was finally set up as a “WHO hosted civil society network”,
  • and the difficult political and governance environment in which the Commission starts to work.

There were high expectations when the proposal was launched, based on the urgency to address some key failures and shortcomings of WHO engagement with civil society. However, frustrations about the way the Commission was finally set up by WHO have already led to strongly diverging assessments and positions of “interested” civil society organizations regarding the Commission, with some of us, such as the MMI Network, engaging in the Commission and others keeping their distance and watching the initial steps critically and sceptically.

Good news is that the “Civil Society Interest Group in a Civil Society Commission”, with its over 130 members, will be kept alive despite the launch of the Commission. The Interest Group might become, at one moment, a “Commission watch”, critically assessing and discussing the output of the Commission (will it provide relevant and timely advice to the WHO, and will the recommendations be taken up?) and how the Commission and its Steering Committee will get there (water-proof governance, effectiveness, etc.).

A suivre…

Thomas Schwarz, August 2023
Contact for enquiries: schwarz@medicusmundi.org