Episode 16 · International
How the World Health Organization is evolving
Dr Alain Labrique · Director, Digital and Innovation, World Health Organization
Jun 2025
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About this episode
A conversation on the future of the World Health Organization, rethinking how we approach digital implementation and funding in LMICs, and what it really means to decolonize global health. Alain Labrique - shaped by a childhood in Dhaka and decades of implementation science - offers a refreshingly honest take on the USAID funding crisis, the quiet collapse of digital infrastructure it has triggered, and where WHO is focusing next.
“Countries need to be in the driver's seat of their own development agenda… The earmarking of assistance has to stop.”
Dr Alain Labrique
What we cover
- 01Alain's journey: from Dhaka to Johns Hopkins to the WHO - and why there is no linear path
- 02The quiet collapse: how USAID cuts have taken down servers, EHR systems, and supply chain platforms across the Global South
- 03REDHI - Resilient Essential Digital Health Infrastructure: what minimum core systems every country needs to own
- 04Shifting the nexus of control: why earmarked donor assistance has to stop
- 05Private sector myths: why companies thrive on rules and clear governance, not chaos
- 06India's national digital health mission as a model for structured ecosystem building
- 07WHO's Global Strategy on Digital Health extended to 2034 - and what the priorities are
- 08The Global Initiative on AI for Health: regulatory alignment, agent-based models, and helping governments differentiate what works
- 09Identity as foundational infrastructure: hundreds of millions of people who still don't officially exist
- 10Advice to builders in the Global North: invest to make yourself irrelevant
About the guest
Dr Alain Labrique
Director, Digital and Innovation, World Health Organization
Dr Alain Labrique is the Director of Digital Health and Innovation at the World Health Organization. A Belgian-Indian-Bangladeshi who grew up in Dhaka, he spent nearly a decade as a field epidemiologist in rural Bangladesh before joining Johns Hopkins as a professor of public health, where he founded the Center for Global Digital Health and Innovation. He chaired the first ever WHO evidence-based guidelines on digital health and has been a defining voice in establishing the field's foundational taxonomy and research standards.
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Transcript
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