An Emergency in Global Health — and What We Can Do About It

When we know that suffering is preventable, and when we have evidence about how to prevent it, and the capacity to do so without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we should act.

We are at a critical moment for global health.

The Life You Can Save has just released its new Health Sector Report 2026–2028: Strategic Priorities for High-Impact Giving. It is a detailed report of more than 60 pages, now available to download from The Life You Can Save website. It sets out where donors can do the most good in global health over the next three years.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, global health aid reached $80.3 billion. It is now projected to fall to $36.2 billion by 2030. The United States, historically the largest bilateral donor to global health, cut its health aid by an estimated 67% in 2025. Major European donors have moved in a similar direction: the United Kingdom reduced disbursements by 39%, while France and Germany have also made substantial cuts.

The disruption in global health funding has exposed the fragility of systems dependent on government aid. When major government donors withdraw suddenly, the consequences can be severe. Clinics lose resources. Supply chains weaken. Community health workers may go unsupported. Programs that have been saving lives are interrupted.

Sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the highest concentration of multidimensional poverty and the greatest dependence on external health financing, has already seen a 25% drop in external health assistance in a single year.

These numbers mean children will not receive malaria prevention. They mean mothers will not get basic care during pregnancy and childbirth. They mean families will lose a child to a disease that could have been prevented.

The report projects that cuts to maternal and child health aid could contribute to an additional 4.5 million deaths among children under five by 2030, reversing the downward trend that we have seen for the past 20 years.

That is a moral emergency. But it is also a reason to act.

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The Life You Can Save’s mission is to help lift people out of poverty by changing the way people think about and donate to charity. Since 2013, it has helped direct more than $140 million to research-backed, high-impact charities.

This new report establishes The Life You Can Save’s strategic direction for health sector recommendations from 2026 to 2028. It is the first in a new series of strategic reviews. Similar reports will follow on Education, Livelihoods, and Women and Girls.

The report is guided by The Life You Can Save’s evaluation framework: scale, neglectedness, and solvability. In plain terms, that means asking three questions. How large is the problem? Is it being neglected by other funders? And do we know of interventions that can make real progress?

That is the right way to think about giving. We should want our donations to help as many people as possible.

A key strength of this report is that it looks not only at mortality — how many people die — but also at how many people are living with illness, disability, or chronic conditions, and how severe those conditions are. Looking at both gives us a fuller picture of the real burden of disease.

The report identifies several urgent priorities. In low-income countries, more than half of all health loss is driven by communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases. Neonatal disorders, respiratory infections, malaria, neglected tropical diseases, tuberculosis, and maternal and child health remain areas where more funding can do a great deal of good.

We already know interventions that work: malaria prevention, routine immunization, nutritional supplements, community health workers, family planning, kangaroo mother care, and basic primary healthcare. These are proven ways of saving and improving lives.

Community health worker programs, when properly integrated into national health systems, can reduce under-five mortality by up to 27% and infant mortality by 33%. Malaria interventions such as long-lasting insecticidal nets and seasonal chemoprevention can reach tens of millions of children at very low cost.

At the same time, the report makes clear that we cannot think only in terms of individual diseases. Health systems themselves need strengthening. A child cannot receive malaria treatment if the local clinic has no medicine. A mother cannot receive proper care if there is no trained health worker nearby. A vaccination program cannot succeed if supply chains break down.

That is why the report emphasizes community health workers, medicine supply chains, primary healthcare, and technical assistance to governments. These may sound less dramatic than a single lifesaving intervention, but they are often what make lifesaving interventions possible.

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The Life You Can Save’s Maximize Your Impact Fund has been designed to allow donations to move toward the highest-impact opportunities as they emerge.

In a time when major donors are pulling back, flexible and evidence-based funding matters. It can support the workforce that delivers care, the supply chains that keep medicines available, and the primary health systems that make prevention and treatment possible at scale.

The moral point is simple.

When we know that suffering and death are preventable, and when we have evidence about how to prevent them, and the capacity to do so without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we should act.

The full Health Sector Report 2026–2028 is available now on The Life You Can Save website. I encourage you to read it.

And I invite you to donate to The Life You Can Save today — especially through the Maximize Your Impact Fund — so your gift can go where evidence suggests it can do the most good.