On 17-18 March 2025, the Co-Creation Workshop of the EU Joint Action for Global Health Impact (EU JA GHI) successfully brought together key EU and non-EU global health policymakers and experts in Berlin. Hosted in the German Federal Ministry of Health, and organized by the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) and colleagues from the Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health and the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, the workshop provided a platform for co-creating concrete proposals to strengthen strategic dialogue, coordination, and joint priority setting in global health.

Fostering Stronger Partnerships on an equal footing 

The two-day event facilitated fruitful discussions on how to improve action-oriented partnership building in global health, bringing together high-level representatives from Africa CDC, the African Medicines Agency, WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean, Fiocruz Brazil, UK Health Security Agency, the European Commission (DG SANTE and DG INTPA), and EU Member States and Norway. 

Discussions focused on successful experiences in global health cooperation, the EU's current strategic discussion forums and dialogue processes in global health, and perspectives from the African region, the Eastern Mediterranean, South America and the NGO sector on cooperation, dialogue processes and joint priority setting between the EU and global partners in global health. Participants noted in particular the need to move towards an understanding of global health as a joint responsibility, to provide a clearer picture of the opportunities for EU-supported global health cooperation, and the role of communities in defining needs and implementing context-specific global health interventions.

Concrete proposals to strengthen EU and international coordination and to increase the impact of joint activities were co-developed, some of which will be piloted in the context of the EU JA GHI in the future.