Earlier this month, senior officials at the World Health Organization (WHO) told journalists in a newly refurbished pressroom at the agency’s headquarters that its finances were “stable”. Following a year that saw its biggest donor withdraw as a member, forcing it to cut 25 per cent of its staff, its financial chief said that 85 per cent of its 2026 and 2027 budget had been financed.

“While we are looking at resource mobilisation, we’re also looking at tightening our belts,” Raul Thomas, assistant director general for business operations and compliance, explained, admitting that the WHO “will have great difficulty mobilising the last 15 per cent”.

Sitting at the centre of the press podium, surrounded by his deputies, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director general, backed up Thomas’s outlook. “We are stable now and moving forward”, since the retreat of the United States from the health body, he said. The Ethiopian noted that the WHO’s financial reform, allowing for incremental increases in state member fees, has been a big plus.

Mandatory contributions have historically accounted for only a quarter of the organisation’s total funding. States have agreed to raise their contributions by 20 per cent twice, in 2023 and in 2025. Further increments are scheduled to be negotiated in 2027, 2029 and 2031 to bring mandatory funding up to par with voluntary donations that the agency relies on. The WHO also reduced its biennial budget for 2026 and 2027 from $5.3 billion to $4.2bn.

“Our financing actually is better,” Tedros emphasised. “Without the reform, it would have been a problem.”

Read more: Nations agree to raise their WHO fees in wake of US retreat

Nonetheless, the director general, now in his final year at the UN agency, warned that member states should not assume that the financial road ahead will be clear. “The future of WHO will also be defined by how successful we are in terms of the assessed contribution increases or the financial reform in general.”

As west retreats, others step in

Suerie Moon, co-director of the Global Health Centre at the Geneva Graduate Institute, explains that every year at the WHO, there’s “a non-stop effort” to ensure funding. She says a continued reliance on non-flexible, voluntary funding earmarked for specific projects, as well as donors withholding contributions – sometimes for political leverage – complicates the organisation’s financial plans. Meanwhile, ongoing cuts and predictions of a global economic downturn stemming from the war in the Middle East may further aggravate the situation, as costs rise and member states focus on national spending needs.

Soaring prices driven by the conflict and supply chain disruptions have already affected the WHO’s procurement of emergency health kits for crises, officials at the global health body said. “We are continuing to negotiate at least from a procurement standpoint on how we can bring down a little bit the prices or reduce the increases, but we are seeing it across the board,” said Thomas.

Altaf Musani, WHO director of health emergencies, meanwhile, said aid cuts have already deprived roughly 53 million people in crisis situations of access to healthcare.

Last month, Thomas told the Association of Accredited Correspondents at the UN at the end of April that the agency is looking at non-traditional, or non-western, donors for funding to close the biennial 15 per cent funding gap. “It’s not that we won’t go to the traditional donors, but we’re expanding that donor base.”

Since the dramatic drop in funding from the US, formerly the WHO’s biggest contributor, Moon highlights that there hadn’t been a “sudden jump by non-traditional states to compensate for the US”. Last May, at the World Health Assembly, China pledged $500 million in voluntary funding until 2030, a sharp rise from the $2.5m it contributed over 2024 and 2025.

The WHO did not respond to questions from Geneva Solutions about how much of the pledged amount had been disbursed. China’s mission in Geneva did not respond to questions raised about the funding.

Other countries, particularly Gulf states, have meanwhile been increasing their voluntary contributions to the organisation in recent years. Similarly to “western liberal democracies have in the past”, Moon explains that they may be seeking “to raise their profile and prioritise health as one of the issues that they would like to be known for”. She noted that the shift in the UN agency’s list of top donors may affect how it manages the money.

‘Sustainable’ spending

Amid these financial uncertainties, WHO executives say the organisation is also reviewing its expenditure through “sustainability plans”. This includes working more closely with collaborating centres, including universities and research institutes that support WHO programmes and are independently funded. On influenza, for example, the WHO works with dozens of national centres around the world, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US,

When asked about any plans for further job cuts, Thomas denied that these were part of the WHO’s current strategies, but could not rule them out entirely as a future possibility. Instead, he said, the organisation was “looking at ways to use funding that may have been for activities to cover salaries in the most important areas”.

Meanwhile, WHO data shows that the number of consultants employed by the agency by the end of 2025 decreased by 23 per cent, slightly less than the staff reductions. Global heath reporter Elaine Fletcher explained to Geneva Solutions that consultants continue to represent a significant proportion of the agency’s workforce, at 5,844 – including an overwhelming number hired in Africa and Southeast Asia – compared with regular staff numbering 8,569 in December.

Upcoming donor politics

The upcoming change in leadership will also be a strategic moment for the organisation to boost its coffers.  Moon says the race for the top job at the organisation may attract funding from candidates’ home countries, which could be seen as a strategic opportunity. 

Given the relatively small size of the WHO budget, compared to some government or agency accounts, “you don’t have to be the richest country in the world to dangle a few 100 million dollars, which could go a long way in their budget,” the expert notes.

The biggest ongoing challenge, however, will be whether major donors will announce further aid cuts. In the medium and longer term, “countries will have to  agree on the step up every two years, and there’s always drama around that.”

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — Sports betting should be regulated as a federal financial product rather than a state-licensed casino product, two panelists said Thursday.

Appearing at Consensus Miami 2026, Jacob Fortinsky, co-founder and CEO of sports betting platform Novig, said the legacy sportsbook model is structurally broken because it treats winning bettors as cheaters.

“Sports betting is really the only industry in the country that regularly limits and bans their power users,” Fortinsky said. He framed sports event contracts as binary financial instruments that “for so long have been treated as a gambling product and instead should really be treated as a financial product.” Globally, he said, sports betting is “a $2 trillion asset class still dominated by these legacy casinos.”

Adam Mastrelli, founder of 57 Maiden, a firm that builds AI-driven trading strategies for prediction markets, validated the critique with personal experience.

“My partner and I got kicked off of two big sportsbooks within two months of trading because we were sharp,” he said, It’s like “LeBron James getting kicked out of the NBA for being too good,” he added.

Mastrelli said the team turned to Novig, which he said charges no fees and allows traders to create synthetic positions.

Mastrelli said his firm’s edge decayed quickly, and of 154 proposed trading strategies, only three currently run profitably.

“This edge will go away,” he said, “so if you can build systems that can keep up with that edge and that alpha… then it becomes really, really intriguing.” His most profitable season, he said, was the WNBA.

Fortinsky said Novig is on track to transition this summer from a sweepstakes model live in 35 states to a federal DCM framework that will let it operate in all 50 states. An earlier attempt to be regulated at the state level in Colorado, he said, was a wake-up call. “Regulators told us essentially you’re naive if you think we care about consumer protection or innovation or market efficiency. We really just care about our tax revenue,” he said.

The federal-state fight, Fortinsky added, is “going to get to the Supreme Court in the next two or three years,” with 15 pending lawsuits between the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Kalshi, Robinhood and various states. Within prediction markets, he argued sports is “counterintuitively actually the safest vertical,” given the bigger insider-trading and manipulation concerns around political and event-driven contracts.

Mastrelli, who said he avoids offshore platforms entirely, compared prediction markets to equities exchanges: “When I see a robust equities market now, this is AQR against SIG. It doesn’t go away.”

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