Thank you Chair,
Norway supports the approval of the proposed programme budget. We also strongly support the proposal to increase assessed contributions.
WHO has made considerable progress in reforming the organization and improving transparency and accountability. We believe there is a strong investment case for this budget. Now we as member states need to ensure it is financed.
Through an improved budgeting process, we now have a budget with a good profile. Norway supports the increases to the health emergencies programme and to AMR.
We support strengthening WHO’s work on HIV/AIDS to ensure the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS can continue its work, especially in the African region.
Ideally we would have liked to avoid the overall reduction for non-communicable diseases, but we note that budgets for noncommunicable diseases are actually increasing at the country level in most regions, and that the budget still allows to increase work provided that WHO receives more funding.
We welcome the ‘money for value plan’, and the proposed cuts to ‘corporate services’ and ‘enabling functions’. We are happy to see that ‘compliance, risk management and ethics’, ‘internal oversight services’ and ‘evaluation’ will not be affected by the reductions.
Thank you.