By Emma Farge
Geneva: The World Health Organization has begun fixing priorities and announced a one-year limit on staff contracts, an internal memo showed on Tuesday, as it aims to ensure its survival after the U.S. withdrew in January.
The memo, dated March 10 and signed by WHO’s Assistant Director-General Raul Thomas, laid out further cost-cutting measures – the latest in a series of such steps since U.S. President Donald Trump’s withdrawal announcement.
Washington, which was instrumental in helping set up the agency after World War Two and has been one of its most active members, is by far the U.N. health agency’s biggest financial backer, contributing around 18per cent of its overall funding.
Senior WHO officials have begun “prioritization” work over the past three weeks to make the global health agency sustainable, the document says.
“While operating in an extremely fluid environment, WHO’s senior management are working to navigate these shifting tides by undertaking a prioritization process,” the memo said.
“Their work will ensure that every resource is directed toward the most pressing priorities while preserving WHO’s ability to make a lasting impact,” it said.
It added that staff are working to secure additional funding from countries, private donors and philanthropists, without saying if these efforts had been successful.
It stopped short of announcing immediate staff cuts but said that “given the magnitude of the challenges we face, some difficult decisions are unavoidable.”
WHO spokesperson Margaret Harris told a press briefing that, even before U.S. funding cuts, the agency was undergoing a transformation to shift resources away from its Geneva headquarters and into recipient countries.
“So what’s really been happening is a big transfer of funding and staffing and commitment at country level away from HQ,” she said. “It has been a slow process and for sure, the cold winds of economic rationalization are speeding that up.”
WHO documents show the U.N. agency has over a quarter of its 9,473 staff based in its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland which is one of the most expensive cities in the world. (Reporting by Emma Farge, Writing by Rachel More, Editing by Friederike Heine and Christina Fincher)
