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WHO Civil Society Working Group on NCDs: Call for new members

The global health community is on a tight deadline in its fight against NCDs, and every voice matters. Civil society should come together for greater action across sectors to ensure strengthened and efficient NCD response at national, regional and global levels.

The WHO Civil Society Working Group on NCDs (CSWG) is a WHO informal network of NCD-related civil society organizations (CSOs) established in 2017 to provide bold and at the same time practical recommendations to the WHO Director-General on key milestones in the global NCD agenda.

The CSWG envisions to strengthen dialogue, foster collaboration and provide recommendations to support WHO’s Secretariat in the engagement with civil society at country, regional and global levels to achieve NCD-related objectives of the WHO General Programme of Work as well as to accelerate achievement of NCD-related Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets.

This is the third cycle of the WHO Civil Society Working Group on NCDs with a term of three years, from February 2024 to February 2027. The goal of the third cycle is to promote, support and mobilize civil society advocacy across the milestones of the preparatory process leading to the fourth high-level meeting of the United Nations General Assembly on NCDs (HLM4), ‘the Road to 2025’, as well as relevant milestones in the follow-up to HLM4.

HLM4 provides an important opportunity to adopt a new, ambitious and achievable political declaration on NCDs towards 2050, based on evidence and grounded in human rights. It will serve as an important framework to accelerate the global NCD response from 2025, and every country, nongovernmental organization (NGO), entity, citizen and person living with an NCD has an important role to play in enabling countries to achieve SDG target 3.4 (by 2030, reduce by one third premature mortality from NCDs through prevention and treatment of NCDs and promotion of mental health and well-being).

As part of those efforts WHO is seeking CSOs to serve as additional members of the third cycle of the CSWG. The detailed call for new members provides information about the working group, the CSOs profiles being sought, the process to express interest, and the process of selection.

Issued on: 15 April 2024

Deadline: 3 May 2024