Our 2026-2027 advocacy campaign will focus on why we should advocate for more global health funding, within a Canadian context.Let's take a deeper dive!
Global Health Funding, Power, and Advocacy in Canada
Global Health Funding, Power, and Advocacy in Canada
Module Overview
Earlier modules introduced Partners In Health, the right to health and strong public health systems. This module follows the public decisions that fund those systems, the global structures that shape access to resources, and the role of advocacy in changing those decisions. At the Training Institute, SPIHC members will build and refine a declaration together. This module provides background and questions for that collective process.
Module Objectives
By the end of this module, students should be able to:
Define global health funding, Global Health Initiatives, Global Affairs Canada and Official Development Assistance.
Explain how Canadian funding priorities move from political decisions to program delivery.
Connect funding pressures to colonialism, debt, extraction, unequal trade and institutional power.
Interpret Canadian aid and public-perception data accurately.
Assess “mutual benefit” framing and identify the elements of a declaration.
What is global health funding, and why does it matter?
Global health funding brings together public, philanthropic, multilateral and other resources that support health across borders and reduce health inequities. Global Health Initiatives, or GHIs, are partnerships organized around priorities such as HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, immunization, maternal and child health, and health-system strengthening. They are one channel within this wider funding landscape.
Predictable, long-term financing pays health workers, procures medicines and diagnostics, maintains facilities, strengthens laboratories and data systems, and supports community-based care. Abrupt cuts can interrupt treatment, remove staff, shrink outreach and shift costs onto households and communities.
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Drag and Drop: Match the Terms!
Match the four terms with their corresponding descriptions.
Global Affairs Canada, or GAC, leads much of Canada’s international-assistance policy and spending. Other federal departments and public entities also report eligible Official Development Assistance (ODA).
ODA is an international statistical category maintained by the OECD Development Assistance Committee. Canadian law requires reported ODA to contribute to poverty reduction, take account of the perspectives of poor people, and remain consistent with international human-rights standards.
GAC Funding and Canadian aid has made many positive impacts!
In the 2024-2025 fiscal year, Canada invested $762 million CAD across 414 projects in 130 countries to strengthen primary health care systems.
Specifically, Canada’s investment in the Global Financing Facility for Women, Children, and Adolescents (GFF) improved the ability of partner governments to protect and advance sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHRs).
GAC’s support towards protecting and advancing SRHR helped PIH Canada and their sister organization, Zanmi Lasante, implement an intervention in Haiti: Expanding Access to Health and Rights for Women. The intervention was a 40-month project, commencing in December 2019, and ending in April 2023. PIH Canada and Zanmi Lasante aimed to address gaps within SRHRs affecting women, girls, and boys in Haiti, in response to and prevention of sexual and gender-based violence.
Why does the funding system matter now?
Global health funding operates within a system shaped by colonial rule and its afterlives, extraction of labour and natural resources, unequal trade, debt burdens, tax avoidance, political decisions and international institutions. These forces continue to influence how wealth and decision-making power are distributed. Financing advances health equity when it supports durable public systems, country-led priorities and long-term planning.
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Why Are Poor Countries Poor?
As you watch, identify one historical structure and one present-day rule or institution that shapes which countries have resources for health.
Did you know...
There were significant cuts made in the 2025/2026 Canadian federal budget, specifically towards foreign aid. This has lasting implications!
Timeline of Global Health Funding Pressures
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UNAIDS Chief on Canadian Aid Cuts
Listen for the connection between donor reductions, interrupted services and the broader contraction in aid.
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A Short Reflection on Funding Pressures
Choose one event from the timeline. In two or three sentences, connect it to one structural condition and one consequence for people, health workers or public systems.
Global health cooperation creates shared benefits through knowledge, preparedness and stronger public systems. Rights, country leadership, and structural responsibility provide the foundation for financing.
A “mutual benefit” policy becomes harmful when returns to Canadian companies, jobs, security interests or political priorities determine where funding goes. Donor-return requirements can:
Redirect resources from priorities identified by affected countries and communities.
Recreate tied-aid arrangements that favour donor-country firms.
Weaken local public institutions and preserve unequal decision-making power.
Turn health and dignity into a transaction.
Mutual Benefit in Global Health: Promise and Peril
A declaration is a public statement through which a group names its values, its analysis, its commitments and the change it seeks. It creates a shared political position and a reference point for future accountability.
A companion advocacy brieftranslates these principles into specific federal asks, evidence, decision-makers and timing.
How a declaration is useful
A declaration turns shared values and analysis into an organizing tool. It can:
Give chapters common language for public communication, recruitment, meetings with MPs and partnerships.
Guide campaign choices by helping members assess whether an ask or tactic reflects their principles.
Orient new members and preserve continuity as student leadership changes.
Make the network’s commitments visible and create a basis for accountability.
Provide the political foundation for specific advocacy briefs, government asks and collective actions.
For SPIHC, the declaration can help chapters act from a shared political foundation while adapting tactics to their local contexts.
The Cange Declaration
In 2001, people receiving HIV treatment in Cange, Haiti, used the Cange Declaration to speak from their lived experience and demand equitable access for others who were still denied treatment.
Its powercomes from the people, relationships and struggle that produced it.
Its political formconnectsvoice, structural diagnosis, values and collective commitment. SPIHC’s process will generate original language grounded in its own constituency, analysis and responsibilities.
"The right to health is the right to life. Everyone has a right to live. That means if we were not living in misery but in poverty, we would not be in this predicament today. Having no resources is a great problem for poor people, especially for women and those with small children. This is what in our abject Haitian reality is recognized as "the very struggle for life which inherently destroys life"; that is, as we scrape for life, we encounter death.”
– Nerlande Lahens, a patient of Partners In Health, who spoke on behalf of patients receiving HIV treatment in Cange, Haiti (August 24, 2001)
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The Cange Declaration
As you watch, listen for four elements: voice, diagnosis, value, and demand or commitment.
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Check Your Understanding!
Select the correct answer to test your understanding of the Cange Declaration.
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Help put together the SPIHC Declaration
Before you finish, contribute three brief ideas. Your responses will help shape the Declaration we will build together at the Training Institute.
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