WICID Guest Lecture – Future Pandemic Governance: Imperatives for Democratic Legitimacy and Efficiency

Future Pandemic Governance: Imperatives for Democratic Legitimacy and Efficiency

 Tuesday 3 March 2026

12:00 - 13:45

E2.02 (Social Sciences Building)

About the Lecture:

The COVID-19 pandemic saw widespread inequity in access to vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics. There has been much recent discourse on the need for a reformed global health system. Wellcome Trust engaged five regional experts to produce bold ideas of what they thought needed to change, including that domestic institutions control priority-setting. The Africa Health Sovereignty Summit held in Accra in August 2025 embraced four priorities, including a Presidential High-Level Panel to design a roadmap for a re-imagined global health governance architecture aligned with national and international efforts. At the same time, detrimental bilateral agreements have been agreed with the United States which seem to undermine ideas from the Accra Summit. In this lecture, Dr Rahman unpacks key events occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic from an insider-outsider perspective, drawing on principles of democratic legitimacy and decolonisation literature, reflecting on whether reform initiatives above will work and what needs to be carried forward.

About the Lecturer:

Fifa A Rahman PhD is Principal Consultant at Matahari Global Solutions. She is a specialist global health lawyer with a PhD in political economy and trade-related intellectual property for biologic medicines. At Matahari, she leads a multinational team of eight working across multiple key projects, including on developing the African Union health workforce compact, on gender in public health emergencies, decolonial grantmaking, and critical path analyses for novel diagnostics, including those for chlamydia/gonorrhea and TB. She was Pandemic Negotiations Consultant for Africa Group negotiators on the Pandemic Treaty negotiations from Jan-August 2024. She is also on the WHO Guideline Development Group for SARS-CoV-2 testing and the WHO Recommendations Development Group for Rapid Diagnostic Test Accessibility Considerations for professional use and self-tests. During the COVID-19 response, she was the lead civil society representative for the ACT-Accelerator, responsible for consulting global civil society and distilling findings in biweekly coordination meetings during the acute phase of the pandemic with heads of agencies and diplomats. Her work across these roles has entailed the need for effective and culturally competent communication with health ministers, diplomats, and officials at global health agencies, as well as communities of people living with diseases. These partnerships have involved the building of genuine cross-sector camaraderie and co-creating work that is both technically robust and inclusive.