This is the moment: from the UK Global Health Summit 2026 to the Global Partnerships Conference

Last month, Global Health Partnerships (GHP) hosted the UK Global Health Summit 2026 (UKGHS 2026) at the Royal College of Physicians in London.

Spanning 7 venues with 110 speakers from 22 countries, the summit was a landmark moment for the global health community, bringing together an exceptional gathering of global health professionals for three days of dialogue, shared learning and renewed commitment to equitable global health.

Health ministers and permanent secretaries from Kenya, Zambia, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Tanzania attended alongside their delegations. They were joined by UK parliamentarians, including Sir Andrew Mitchell MP, Lord Crisp, Baroness Prashar, Dr Simon Opher MP, Beccy Cooper MP and Monica Harding MP, and hundreds of frontline health professionals.

Shaping tomorrow’s health, together

Under the conference theme, ‘Shaping Tomorrow’s Health, together’, attendees discussed some of the most urgent issues facing global health.

Questions like:

• How do we organise and sustain health systems in a world of shrinking fiscal space and growing demand? 
• What does a genuinely equitable partnership between health systems look like?
• How do we better harness the expertise of internationally recruited health workers – not just as staff but as global ambassadors connecting the UK to over 20 health systems worldwide?

The timing of these discussions could not be more apt.

In May, the UK will co-host the Global Partnerships Conference alongside South Africa. This is a major moment for the UK to set out its vision for global development on the world stage.

What was discussed and celebrated at UKGHS 2026 feels like essential preparation for that moment. The question now is whether the ambition expressed so clearly at that conference will translate into UK government policy direction.

A changed world demands a different response

This is a moment of profound difficulty for global health. 

Health systems in every country — rich and poor — are under unprecedented strain.

The Covid pandemic exposed and deepened structural fragility.

Non-communicable diseases are rising. Mental health needs are overwhelming capacity. And health workforces are stretched to breaking point. 

Into this picture have come other shocks.

The United States has declared war with Iran and fundamentally restructured its aid programme, replacing decades of multilateral cooperation with time-bound bilateral compacts.

The UK, meanwhile, has made its own painful cuts to ODA, and we do not minimise the impact of this decision.

This is a crisis. But it is also a moment of change.

Traditional aid, however well-intentioned, has too often reproduced the very hierarchies it sought to address.

UKGHS 2026 argued for something different. Not charity. Not intervention. Not the export of solutions devised elsewhere. But a genuine, equitable partnership — co-designed, co-led and mutually beneficial. 

This is urgent, achievable and necessary. It is what partner countries themselves are asking for and are already implementing. It is also what our Health Partnership community has been pioneering for decades. 

A new UK model of engagement for global health

There is no doubt that the context in which the Global Partnerships Conference will take place is challenging. But it is a context in which the UK has both an opportunity and a responsibility to demonstrate a new UK model of engagement – one based on honesty and humility, recognising the value the UK and other high-income countries gain from their engagement with other health systems and health workforces. This is something the APPG Co Investment Inquiry report, released at UKGHS 2026, clearly set out. 

One in five NHS staff report a non-British nationality – the vast majority of whom were trained overseas. It is estimated that the UK tax payer has saved billions of pounds as a result, while source countries have invested in that education and borne the cost of losing it.

If we benefit, and we do, then we have a responsibility to invest in the systems we draw from. The report argues for proportionate co-investment: not a new form of aid dependency, but a fair acknowledgement of shared interest and responsibility.

That framing, clear about mutual benefit, should be at the heart of what the UK brings to the Global Partnerships Conference.

Alongside honesty, the UKGHS 2026 also made the strong case for humility by highlighting the mutual benefit of partnership between health systems.

The partnership between the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and Homa Bay County in Kenya is a case in point. Homa Bay has over 3,000 community health promoters who go into households and reach the people that clinic-based systems often miss.

Liverpool, meanwhile, is trying to build exactly that kind of community-centred infrastructure through its own Primary Care Networks. So, Liverpool went to Homa Bay to learn. Kenyan health leaders came to Liverpool to share what they had built.

The learning ran both ways — and a Liverpool participant described the experience as transformative.
That is not the language of aid. That is the language of equals.

It is also the logic behind the Scottish government’s new £3 million Health Partnership Programme, which works across Malawi, Rwanda, Zambia and Scotland. This programme demonstrates that partnership designed on these principles can work, and that even when resources are constrained, the will to engage differently can produce something genuinely valuable.

What we are calling for in May

The Global Partnerships Conference offers a real opportunity. Not to replace what has been dismantled, but to drive the agenda towards a different model of engagement: durable, reciprocal, honest about mutual benefit and grounded in genuine co-design rather than donor-driven agendas.

But the test of whether the UK seizes this moment will not be in the framing of the conference. It will be in the commitments made, the relationships forged, and whether the principles of equitable partnership, honesty, humility and genuine co-investment are translated into something that endures.

Equitable partnership is not a slogan. It is in GHP’s DNA. It is the design logic of every programme we manage.

And it is, we believe, one of the most effective models to deliver durable improvement in health outcomes in this changing context at the scale the world now needs. 

UKGHS 2026 was the intellectual and moral foundation for that agenda.

We hope the UK government will draw on it in May, and we stand ready to support them in doing so.