WHO must cut budget by 20% after US withdrawal

WHO must cut budget by 20 per cent after US withdrawal Keystone-SDA

The Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO) has proposed cutting its budget by a fifth. This comes after its largest contributor, the US, decided to withdraw. The organisation must now reduce its tasks and staff, it said.

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The WHO is facing a funding gap of almost $600 million (CHF530 million) in 2025 and has “no choice” but to start making cuts, the institution’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said in an internal email obtained by the French news agency AFP. The letter was sent to employees of the UN health agency on Friday.

After moving into the White House in January, US President Donald Trump decided to freeze almost all US foreign aid, including for important programmes to improve health around the world.

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Trump justified his decision to withdraw his country from the WHO in January with the discrepancy between the financial contributions of the US and China and accused the organisation of “ripping off” his country.

The US was by far the largest contributor to the WHO’s budget: in the last two-year budget cycle for 2022 to 2023, it contributed 16.3% of the organisation’s total budget of $7.89 billion. The majority of US funding came from voluntary contributions for specific projects and not from a fixed contribution.

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Ghebreyesus noted that the WHO was already struggling with financial constraints before the US withdrawal began and had started working on measures to increase its efficiency more than nine months ago. “Although we have achieved significant cost savings, the current economic and geopolitical conditions make the mobilisation of resources particularly difficult,” he wrote.

Translated from German by DeepL/ts

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