PMNCH Annual Accountability Breakfast

The PMNCH Accountability Breakfast has established itself over the years as one of the defining high-level dialogues of UNGA week on women’s, children’s, and adolescents’ health. This year’s edition arrives at a moment of particular strategic weight. The global health architecture is under strain. Official development assistance is projected to fall by 6.9% in 2026, bringing ODA to its lowest level since 2014. Accountability mechanisms, from global scorecards to national budget tracking systems, are fragmented, often donor-driven and disconnected from the communities they are meant to serve. At the same time, a series of political moments, regionally and globally, have opened new entry points for PMNCH and its partners to shape the terms of the accountability debate.

The 2026 PMNCH Accountability Breakfast takes its central question: what does strong accountability for financing to improve women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health and well-being actually require in the world as it is today? We have moved beyond the era in which accountability was largely equated with data monitoring and beyond a conception of governance in which the state stands as the responsible actor. Accountability instruments have remained state-centred despite power actors shaping health outcomes have diversified. And the people most affected by accountability failures, those whose lives depend on the systems being discussed, deserve a seat at the table where those discussions happen. Let us not shy away from hard questions – strong accountability requires for each of us to agree upon and enforce accountability for common good, so that every dollar, shilling available yields most impact.

This will be a conversation about the broader political and social accountability mechanisms and the processes through which communities and young people, civil society, parliaments, and regional bodies can demand that the decision to finance, or not finance, women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health is treated as a duty, and that those responsible answer for it.

Within this framework, the PMNCH’s Financing Campaign provides the connective tissue. The breakfast will serve simultaneously as a moment to surface evidence and best practice, to anchor the financing campaign in a broader accountability frame, and to generate political momentum toward specific processes in the months ahead.

Three overarching questions will structure the event:

  1. Look back. What have the political, social and civic accountability processes that surround WCAH financing genuinely delivered, and where have they failed? When communities and young people, parliaments and civil society have successfully held duty bearers to account for financing decisions, what made that possible?
  2. Look in. What are partnerships and constituencies doing across civil society coalitions, parliamentary oversight functions and regional bodies to drive accountability at country level, and what does the feedback loop to policy and legislation actually look like?
  3. Look forward. What needs to change? Which upcoming political processes offer leverage, and what specific asks should partners leave the room with?