One Investment, Multiple Returns: Strengthening Child Health through Polio Eradication

Global health faces a defining moment, with countries navigating a shifting architecture of new threats, financing changes, and demands for stronger systems, while SDG progress remains uneven. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative exemplifies effective collective action, uniting governments, communities, donors, and multilateral organizations. Since 1988, polio cases have dropped by over 99%, protecting more than 20 million people from paralysis, yet conflict, fragility, and immunization gaps still threaten final eradication in the last two endemic countries.

Held at the Goals Lounge during UNGA81, this high-level event gathers Member States, UN leaders, civil society, private sector partners, and youth advocates to discuss polio eradication as a model of partnership and accountability. Objectives include positioning the polio effort within global health architecture reform and UN80 priorities, securing renewed political commitment across endemic, outbreak-affected, donor, and partner countries, and showing how these investments strengthen health systems and advance the SDGs.