A fighter for global health: Who will be next to lead the WHO?

the best from her children: “When you encourage and motivate then, they do better. But when you keep hammering them, they get down and withdrawn.”

In the frame In a bid to be more transparent about how it chooses its director general, the WHO has introduced a new selection system. Previously, the 34 members of the WHO’s Executive Board considered various candidates and chose one. That candidate was then rubber-stamped by the 194 member states that make up the World Health Assembly (WHA).

The system lent itself to horse-trading between blocks of countries who would band together behind a series of promised deals to push their preferred candidate to the front.

This time, the Executive Board will select three candidates to go forward to the full WHA, which will vote on the final choice. The three shortlisted candidates will work alongside Chan from January 2017, with the final selection made by the WHA in May 2017.

When nominations closed this week, six candidates had been put forward to succeed Chan. They were Ethiopia’s foreign minister Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus; Flavia Bustreo of Italy, an assistant director general at the WHO; Philippe Douste-Blazy, a French former minister of health; Sania Nishtar, a former minister of education and training in Pakistan; Miklos Szocska, a former health minister for Hungary; and David Nabarro, a British public health and nutrition expert with long experience of working at the WHO and the United Nations. He was appointed the UN secretary general’s special envoy on Ebola in the midst of the Ebola crisis.

Derek Yach, head of the Vitality Institute health research group in the United States and a former WHO official, is another who is eager to see a new leadership formula, one that focuses less on experience in national public health policy and more on delivering global influence.

With the right leader and right reform, he said, “this is an organization with massive global potential.”