Meetings such as the World Economic Forum (WEF) “are highly beneficial for the health sector, since there is a genuine need for reaching out to non-state actors in the midst of the many transformations shaping global and domestic health sector public policy,” Sania Nishtar, founder of Heartfile and Heartfile Health Financing, writes in a Huffington Post opinion piece. “But that is not all the World Economic Forum is doing for health. It is also contributing substantively in the normative and advocacy space,” according to Nishtar, who uses non-communicable diseases (NCDs) as an example. “By identifying NCDs as the top 10 risks to the world in WEF’s Global Risk Reports for two consecutive years (2009 and 2010) it helped raise concern, globally, at a time when it mattered the most,” especially leading up to last year’s U.N. High Level Meeting, she writes.

“The World Economic Forum’s ability to bring together public and private actors creates a much needed space to explore the potential of engagement with the private sector to achieve Health For All,” Nishtar writes, concluding, “By enabling communication, WEF is helping narrow the existing public-private divide in conventional multilateralism and is helping improve global cooperation and understanding. The insights can inform the design of new institutions of global governance” (2/6).