Distinguished Chair Aishath Rishmee, and I would also like to recognize the presence of Dr Petrič.
Esteemed Members of the PBAC, dear colleagues and friends,
Thank you, Madam Chair, for those opening remarks.
Good morning and a very happy New Year to all of you.
The work of this committee is crucial to WHO's financial sustainability, organizational accountability - and ultimately, its success.
Over the next couple of days you will consider key agenda items; most significantly, the implementation of the current Programme Budget, and the draft Programme Budget for 2024-25.
This new Programme Budget marks a number of important milestones.
First, its development has been the most consultative in recent memory.
It has been shaped with the guidance of Member States regarding its format and the level of detail provided.
It is also the first Programme Budget in which country offices will be allocated more than half of the total budget for the biennium.
This is also the first Programme Budget that, if approved by the World Health Assembly, will benefit from the increase in assessed contributions, worth 200 million US dollars, following the historic agreement by the Health Assembly last year.
I thank all Member States for your commitment to begin increasing assessed contributions.
We recognize that with increased flexibility and sustainability come increased expectations for transparency, efficiency, compliance and accountability.
We are fully committed to meeting - and exceeding - those expectations.
I thank especially the Agile Member States Task Group for its recommendations to improve budgetary, programmatic and financing governance.
These recommendations are an important complement to the Secretariat's Implementation Plan on Reform, which we developed as mandated by the 75th World Health Assembly.
The implementation plan builds on the work of the WHO Transformation, which I began upon taking office in 2017, along with lessons from many independent evaluations, audits and assessments, such as MOPAN; and recommendations and decisions of the Executive Board and the Health Assembly.
The implementation plan contains 98 actions that are within the sole remit of the Secretariat, addressing accountability, country impact, financing, governance, human resources, programme budget and resource mobilization.
Thirty-eight of these actions have already been completed. These include significantly enhancing our Programme Budget process;
implementing systems to prevent and respond to sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment;
developing new web-based information portals;
and designing a new replenishment process, similar to the model used by the Global Fund and GAVI, which we will submit to Member States for consideration.
Sixty of the actions are ongoing, or will begin this year.
These include additional reforms to our work on the prevention and response to sexual exploitation, abuse, and harassment.
I will have more to say on this when I address the agenda item tomorrow.
The Secretariat is working actively on the remaining actions in the Implementation Plan, including strengthening country level impact;
And developing a risk management strategy and systems reinforcement across the three levels of WHO.
We will report regularly to Member States on progress.
We thank Member States for your input into the Secretariat Implementation Plan for Reform, and we look forward to the Executive Board's consideration and endorsement of the plan.
We appreciate, as you do, the delicate balance between the governance role of Member States and the management responsibilities of the Secretariat.
We all want a WHO that is agile, proactive, and able to move quickly to respond to global health threats.
In order to achieve that, we as the Secretariat are committed to implementing the priorities and plans of Member States as agreed at the World Health Assembly.
In turn, we ask you as Member States to give the Secretariat the necessary latitude to carry out our mandate to achieve the ambitions you have set, including in the 13th General Programme of Work.
At the Executive Board last year, I laid out five priorities for the coming five years, as we work together to reinvigorate progress towards the GPW, the "triple billion" targets and the health-related SDGs.
Those priorities have since crystallised into what we are calling the "five Ps": Promoting, Providing, Protecting, Powering and Performing for health.
It is important to emphasize that the "five Ps" in no way replace the GPW or the "triple billion" targets. We are not proposing a new strategy.
Rather, they complement and support the GPW.
In fact, the "five Ps" are not new concepts - quite the opposite.
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They are all contained in the GPW itself.
All we have done is to draw them out in order to highlight the key priorities on which we as one WHO - Member States and Secretariat -must focus on in order to accelerate progress towards the GPW and the "triple billion" targets.
We know it will not be easy. In the face of many obstacles, not least the COVID-19 pandemic, our progress has slowed.
For this reason, we are taking a particularly strategic approach in our planning over the next two years.
The new Programme Budget builds on the recently revised 2022-2023 Programme Budget, particularly in strengthening WHO's ability to support Member States in pandemic preparedness and response, stopping sexual misconduct, and increasing our transparency and country-level impact.
A strong WHO has never been more critically needed as it is now, in the context of multiple crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, conflict, over-stretched health systems, the climate crisis, widespread hunger, and other threats to increasingly vulnerable populations.
We appreciate the many opportunities to engage with Member States across the range of our work.
And we look forward to continuing to support you to build a healthier, safer and fairer future for the people we all serve.
I thank you.
