Publieke diensten, waaronder gezondheidszorg, staan in veel delen van de wereld onder grote druk en vereisen sterke en blijvende publieke investeringen. Diverse recente internationale topbijeenkomsten bevestigden opnieuw het belang van meer publieke middelen voor publieke diensten. Om meer publieke middelen vrij te maken, zijn hervormingen van de mondiale financiële architectuur noodzakelijk.
De oproep vraagt internationale financiële instellingen en overheden onder andere om een VN-schuldenconventie in gang te zetten. Wemos ondersteunt dit en nodigt mondiale gezondheidsexperts uit om zich aan te sluiten bij de oproep tot financiële hervormingen, want meer rechtvaardigheid op het gebied van belastingen en schulden is essentieel als we de Duurzame Ontwikkelingsdoelen willen realiseren.
Public services are the foundation of equitable, inclusive, and sustainable development. Universal access to quality education, health, social protection, energy, water, and sanitation builds human capabilities, reduces inequality, and strengthens the social contract between governments and citizens. Conversely, underinvestment or privatization often leads to exclusion, inequality, and erosion of rights. Strong, publicly financed and accountable services are both a moral imperative and a strategic investment – central to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), fulfilling human rights, advancing gender and racial equality, and building resilient economies capable of withstanding future shocks.
Yet national and global policies often fail to do justice to the criticality of public services. The wave of youth-led protests sweeping several countries today reflects widespread frustration as citizens challenge austerity-driven under-funding of education, health, utilities and social protection, demanding governments restore and expand publicly financed, quality public service provision. If we want to make progress on ensuring that our future is public, we need to make this case vigorously in the series of global policy processes happening in November 2025 – at the World Social Summit for Development (WSSD2) in Qatar, the UN Tax Convention negotiations in Kenya, the COP30 Climate conference in Brazil and the G20 Leaders’ Summit in South Africa.
We need to build on the Seville Commitment – the outcome from the fourth UN Financing for Development Summit in July 2025. This acknowledges the important role of ‘public resources, policies and plans’ but fails to articulate a clear vision of financing universal, gender-responsive, and high quality public services that can respond to the climate challenge.
The Doha Political Declaration from WSSD2 offers some strong language, including acknowledging the crucial role of public services provision in ‘recognising, reducing and redistributing women’s disproportionate share of unpaid care and domestic work’. However, much more attention and investment is needed to address the real challenges facing public services and the public sector workforce – and to put public services at the centre of building a just and sustainable future. Privatisation presents clear risks to public services and it is concerning that the Declaration looks uncritically at Public Private partnerships as an instrument of healthcare reform.
The G20 could and should bring a renewed focus on inequality reduction, push back against the threats posed by financialization of healthcare and help to address some of the finance constraints (through bolder action on tax and debt). Finally, COP30 in Belem, Brazil, could embed public services at the heart of agreements around a ‘just transition’.
The recent IMF and World Bank annual meetings (in October 2025) reveal continuing contradictions. Despite 54 countries being in debt crisis, the IMF refuses to recognise this reality as they will only declare a crisis if creditors do not get paid. People dying for lack of health care or children being denied education owing to underfunded schools do not appear to pose a crisis for the IMF. We need to change this mindset. Doing so is particularly important at this time when the IMF is reviewing its program design and conditionality. We must expose the absurdity of the IMF suggesting that governments must cut public sector wage bills in order to increase social spending on health and education – when the reality is that nothing is more important than spending on the frontline workforce of teachers, nurses, midwives, community care workers and doctors, the majority of whom are women.
Public services champions need to make some key common demands across these diverse international forums in November 2025, whether in formal or informal negotiation processes, conference panels, side-meetings, blogs or social media communications:
Making a breakthrough on public services requires both national and international action. Nationally, those working on education, health, water, energy, care, transport, social protection, housing and agriculture need to come together to demand that governments commit to a comprehensive vision of the role of public services. In the light of global uncertainties, trade tariffs, cuts in aid and unfair interest rates triggering debt crises, and in the face of popular demand to recommit to the idea of welfare state in many countries across the world, now is the moment for uniting struggles to demand that governments are proactive, reclaiming sovereignty over economic decision making and advancing inclusive, democratic processes to rebuild a social contract based on public goods and public services.
Internationally, reforms to the global financial architecture are crucial to unleash sustainable financing for public services. One of the most important breakthroughs lies in the work being done to build a UN Framework Convention on Tax, with negotiations continuing in Nairobi in November 2025 and hopes for a strong final convention to be in place by 2027. This will shift power over the making and enforcing of global rules on tax away from the OECD club of rich nations to a representative and inclusive UN space. Fairer global rules and strengthened international tax coordination are critical for countries to generate higher and predictable domestic tax revenues – which are central prerequisites for sustainable financing of universal public services. In the meanwhile, the G20 in South Africa can help by delivering progress on effective taxation of High Net Wealth Individuals, initiated last year under a historic deal in G20 Brazil, to tackle extreme wealth inequality, including gendered and racialised inequality.
We also have an urgent need to change the global architecture on debt, moving power away from the IMF and ad hoc, creditor-led processes that drive the imposition of austerity. We need a more representative and inclusive architecture for addressing debt crises, one that systematically safeguards the fiscal space, equity, and policy autonomy that governments need to deliver universal, high-quality public services. The central call of African nations at the UN Financing for Development conference was for a UN Framework Convention on Sovereign Debt. This was blocked by European nations as the FFD4 outcome had to be a consensus document. But there is now momentum to take the case for a UN Debt Convention to a vote at the UN General Assembly in 2026. Those who care about the future of public services must vigorously support such changes to the international architecture, to break the colonial and patriarchal stranglehold that has undermined public services for a generation or more.
In this year, when we celebrate the 80th anniversary of the United Nations, we need to reassert the centrality of public services to the achievement of human rights and gender equality. It is time to celebrate the inclusive space presented by the UN General Assembly and human rights treaty bodies – whilst challenging the continuing colonial tendencies of global institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. We need representative and inclusive processes nationally and internationally – and we need to build a fairer multilateralism. When people’s voices are properly heard, universal public services are valued and supported.
SIGN ONS:
Ontvang onze nieuwsbrief
