Convivial solidarity workshop: Perspectives on solidarity principles for global health
The EthicsLab at the University of Cape Town was the proud host of the Global Health Solidarity Project's convivial workshop in Johannesburg in February 2026. Hosting it in South Africa was fitting for multiple reasons. Our country's history of struggle and solidarity against apartheid, our hard-won victory to access life-saving HIV/AIDS medicines, our proactive stance on Covid vaccine equity, and our solidarity with the people of Palestine are not just history. It lives too in the EthicsLab's own work — in the lessons and insights from our solidarity summer school with rural women smallholder farmers in Southern Africa. This rich, grounded tradition of showing up and standing with is what made Johannesburg the right place to collectively reflect on what solidarity in global health really means.
The workshop brought together academics, researchers, legal scholars, funders and public health professionals to discuss and refine a series of propositions developed by the Global Health Solidarity Project – informed by six regional workshops across five continents and 75 stakeholder interviews. The result is a set of Principles for Embedding Solidarity in the Global Health Ecosystem, organised in a 3-3-3 framework that addresses what solidarity actually is, how it is enacted, and what ends it should serve.
Crucially, the framework draws a clear line between solidarity and aid — solidarity is not a gift from the powerful to the powerless, but a mutual, trust-based commitment to challenging the structures that produce health inequity in the first place.
The workshop took place against an urgent backdrop: rising nationalism, deep cuts to global health funding, and growing frustration with solidarity being invoked without accountability.
Read the full report to explore the principles, the debates that shaped them, and what they mean for the global health funding ecosystem.