WHO Youth Council opens its 2026–2028 term with a wider global remit in Berlin
The WHO Youth Council has launched its 2026–2028 membership in Berlin, bringing together focal points from 25 youth-led and youth-serving organizations just before the World Health Summit. Eleven organizations are new to the Council, while 14 are returning members, a mix that gives the body continuity without freezing its agenda in place.
The meeting was not a ceremonial reset. It was a working session on how youth participation moves from consultation to influence inside global health governance, where legitimacy often depends on whether the people most affected by policy can shape it early, repeatedly and with enough institutional backing to matter.
Council members span medicine, nursing, pharmacy, public health, mental health, HIV, nutrition, climate, health diplomacy and foreign policy. That breadth matters because modern health policy rarely sits in one lane; decisions about workforce, financing, prevention, communications and planetary risks now intersect in ways that demand cross-disciplinary youth leadership rather than a single-issue advisory model.
Governance, representation and the architecture of youth participation
The Berlin meeting opened with welcome remarks from Dr Gaudenz Silberschmidt, Director of Partnerships and Financing at WHO, alongside Council leadership, F/A/Q Health and the Bertelsmann Stiftung. A roundtable on youth leadership in global health governance connected the Council’s Youth Declaration on Creating Healthy Societies to the ongoing redesign of the global health architecture, placing the discussion squarely inside broader institutional reform efforts.
Members also received an overview of the Council’s role in the Global Health Architecture consultation process. In practice, this positions the Council as more than a symbolic forum: it becomes a channel through which youth perspectives can enter high-level debates on how multilateral health systems are organized, financed and held accountable.
The Council reviewed the achievements, challenges and lessons of the 2024–2026 term and was introduced to its terms of reference, ways of working, Steering Committee, working groups and key projects. A fireside chat examined WHO’s mandate on youth leadership, governance and inclusion across the Organization, reinforcing the operational question behind the rhetoric: how does an intergovernmental agency make youth engagement durable rather than episodic?
Three working groups set priorities for the new term
On the second day, the Council’s three working groups — Promoting Health Education and Literacy, Accessibility and Equity, and Planetary Health — each identified up to three goals for the term. Those categories reflect the current shape of global health work. Health literacy determines whether communities can act on information. Equity determines who can actually access services. Planetary health links environmental strain to the burden that health systems will keep absorbing if climate and ecological pressures remain untreated.
Members also shaped the Council’s operations, including collaboration with WHO departments and regional chapters, communications, external partnerships and funding. A peer session on leadership and sustainability followed, giving the meeting a practical edge: youth governance needs structure, not just intent, if it is going to survive beyond enthusiasm and one convening.
The co-chair of the Eastern Mediterranean Regional Youth Council joined the meeting, further connecting the global body to regional experience. WHO has already established Regional Youth Councils in the Eastern Mediterranean and South-East Asia Regions, with additional regions in development. The structure suggests a layered model of participation, one that can translate global priorities into region-specific advocacy without flattening local realities.
Youth participation in global health weakens when it is treated as an accessory to adult decision-making. In Berlin, the Council worked to make it an operating principle.
The Steering Committee’s early agenda points to institutional follow-through
The meeting was preceded on 8 October by the first session of the 2026–2028 Steering Committee. Members agreed on their ways of working, up to five priority actions to strengthen governance and support for the Council, and three overarching goals for the term.
Those early decisions matter because advisory bodies can lose momentum quickly if responsibilities are diffuse or if administrative support is thin. A steering group with explicit priorities gives the Council a better chance of sustaining work across WHO departments, regional chapters and outside partners, where the practical barriers are often logistical rather than ideological.
Rehman Hassan, WHO Youth Council Co-Chair, described the third term as an opportunity to build on momentum from the last four years while strengthening relationships across member organizations and within the multilateral system. The statement points to a central challenge in youth engagement: expertise alone does not create influence. Influence depends on institutional access, repeated participation and a governing culture willing to treat youth knowledge as operationally relevant.
What the Berlin meeting signals for WHO youth engagement
The Council was established by the WHO Director-General to amplify the voices and expertise of young people in global health. Its members come from youth-led and youth-serving health and non-health organizations across all six WHO regions, and they advise the Director-General and WHO senior leadership.
The Council also serves as an incubator for initiatives and a platform for expanding WHO youth engagement programmes, including Global Model WHO and the WHO Youth Delegate Programme. In health diplomacy terms, that gives the Council a dual function: advising the institution while helping produce the next generation of participants who understand how multilateral health policy is negotiated in real time.
From a public health perspective, the logic is straightforward. Youth leadership is not only about representation; it also shapes how priorities are framed, how communities are reached and how trust is built around complex health challenges. If health systems are expected to respond to the needs of younger populations on mental health, nutrition, climate-related disruption and workforce shortages, then those same populations need a meaningful role in designing the response.
Following the Berlin meeting, Council members are scheduled to take part in the World Health Summit from 11–13 October 2026. The next test will not be whether the Council can gather diverse voices. It will be whether those voices continue to influence WHO processes after the event calendar has moved on and the governance work begins to face its usual constraints.