Investing in Future Generations Through the Economics of Health for All

A webinar co-hosted by the Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health and the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) examined what the WHO’s Economics of Health for All strategy means for the next generation. The session, organised by socialprotection.org on 27 August 2026, built on discussions at the 79th World Health Assembly and took up three themes: the rights of future generations alongside universal health coverage and social protection, foresight methods for longer-term policy design, and economic models beyond GDP.

Moderated by Outi Kuivasniemi, Deputy Director for International Affairs at the Finnish ministry, the 90-minute session paired opening remarks from Taru Koivisto with a three-speaker panel and a question and answer session. Each speaker had ten minutes, and the panel drew on policy work from Finland, Germany and South Africa.

Health as an investment, not a cost

Taru Koivisto, Deputy Director General at the Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, opened with the argument that health and the economy are the same project. She told the audience:

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“Resilient economies are healthy societies. The conditions that generate health are the very same conditions that underpin sustainable economies, resilient democratic governance, and the long-term fiscal viability of states.”

Koivisto described population health as an investment that keeps people productive, extends working lives and reduces costly interventions later. Early action on mental health and non-communicable disease, she said, delivers especially high returns. Universal access to health services and social protection builds trust in institutions and narrows inequities.

She tied the argument to Finland’s own history. Once among the poorest countries in Europe, Finland built its wellbeing through cross-sectoral collaboration and long-term investment in education, public health and social protection. The full effect of those decisions only became visible over time. “The future doesn’t happen to us, we shape it,” she said.

Foresight, Koivisto argued, is no longer a luxury. The United Nations adopted the Pact for the Future at the 2024 Summit of the Future, placing long-term thinking at the centre of global decision making and asking governments to weigh how today’s choices affect future generations.

Intergenerational fairness beyond GDP

Magalí Brosio, Programme Lead for New Economy Goals at the ZOE Institute for Future-Fit Economies, opened the panel with a case for treating intergenerational fairness as a policy design question rather than an abstract ideal. GDP, she noted, measures activity but says little about whether people are living well or whether the conditions for wellbeing will survive into the future.

She drew a line between balancing and choosing:

“Intergenerational fairness is clearly not about choosing future generations over people living today. It is about recognizing that our choices today shape the opportunities available tomorrow and acting accordingly.”

Brosio pointed to a quickly shifting institutional agenda. The United Nations High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP has proposed a set of 30 indicators, including a sustainability and resilience pillar built on greenhouse gas emissions and a biodiversity intactness index. The European Union has appointed its first Commissioner for Intergenerational Fairness and adopted its first intergenerational fairness strategy in March, with work under way on an intergenerational fairness index.

ZOE’s own contribution is an intergenerational governance matrix built on four pillars, which Brosio listed as long-term orientation, prevention and resilience, experimentation and adaptability, representation and participation, and policy coherence. The institute is applying it to case studies, starting with Ireland, where a national wellbeing framework is now connected to the budget process through wellbeing budget tagging.

Democratizing the future

Maiju Lehto, who leads inclusive futures work at the Deaconess Foundation in Finland, argued that foresight means little if the people who will live in the future are not invited to describe it. She calls the principle “the power to define futures, or democratizing futures.

The 160-year-old foundation, which also owns the social and healthcare services company Rinnekodit, has spent three years adapting foresight methods for people rarely included in planning: people experiencing homelessness, people using substance use services, people with intellectual disabilities, migrants, young people and older people. Instead of asking people to predict, Lehto said, the work asks them to imagine. The method uses pictures, objects, simple statements and stories rather than scenarios.

As an example, she read from workshops held with children for Finland’s national child strategy, a glimpse of an ordinary day in 2036 for an 11-year-old:

“On the way I see two rabbits on the grass and a bird I don’t recognize in a tree. A small robot is collecting litter near the forest, although there isn’t much litter anymore. At school, we have a lesson about what we want our city to be like in the future.”

In that future, Lehto noted, nothing is futuristic. What the child values is clean nature, meaningful relationships, safety, participation and the feeling of being heard. The knowledge gathered through this work now feeds Finland’s Ministry of Finance twice a year through its open government programme.

Dignified access and the body of the economy

Dr Lebohang Liepollo Pheko, a political economist at Trade Collective in South Africa and global co-chair of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, brought a majority-world perspective to the panel. She framed the Economics of Health for All not as another set of indicators beside GDP but as a way to change what economies are organised to produce and who benefits from them.

For Pheko, health is a test of dignity. Dignified access, she said, means care that is timely, appropriate, respectful and culturally appropriate, available regardless of income, geography, race, gender or disability, and without illness becoming a route into economic insecurity.

She rooted this in South Africa’s history, where colonialism, racial capitalism and apartheid deliberately racialised land, labour, nutrition and healthcare. The country spends 8 to 9 percent of GDP on health, split sharply between private provision for a well-resourced minority and a public system, bleeding nurses, that serves the majority. She made a distinction the rest of the panel returned to:

“A person can receive publicly funded treatment and return to inadequate housing, food insecurity, hunger, precarious employment, pollution, no water. Treatment may be socialized while many of the conditions that produce sickness remain commodified.”

South Africa’s planned National Health Insurance, she said, aims to socialise health risk by allocating care according to need and pooling resources. Its redistributive intent matters even where its fiscal and governance challenges are considerable. She also named the global dimension: around 150,000 South African nurses prop up the UK National Health Service while South Africa’s own public system struggles.

Pheko closed the panel with a line that framed the whole discussion:

“An economy leaves traces in the body, in breath, in hunger, in exhaustion, in years of life. A well-being economy must leave different traces. Dignity, time, health, and the means to live fully.”

From debate to measurement

The question and answer session turned on how to protect wellbeing economies when budgets tighten and politics harden. Pheko argued that polarisation is materially produced by economic exclusion and insecurity, so the answer cannot be civic education alone. “It requires transforming the conditions that produce alienation, political dispossession and apathy,” she said.

Asked about developing countries that underfund children and youth, Brosio pointed to the roadmap for eradicating poverty beyond growth, a process linked to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and led by former Special Rapporteur Olivier De Schutter. Asked how BRICS countries are taking up the ideas, Pheko noted that “wellbeing” does not translate neatly across languages and pointed to shared work on public health, pharmaceutical purchasing power and joint research. Kuivasniemi added that China, Brazil and Ethiopia had all pushed the WHO resolution through.

On measurement, the panel resisted a simple north-south divide. Pheko pointed out that South Africa’s former Statistician-General Pali Lehohla chaired the UN Statistical Commission, and that Gauteng province runs a quality of life survey measuring life satisfaction, health, safety and community dimensions. Kuivasniemi described a visit to Rwanda’s new health data centre, whose live-streaming dashboards are shared free with any African country that wants them.

Taking the Economics of Health for All forward

Bruno Meessen, a health economist at WHO and a key contributor to the design, evaluation and scaling up of performance-based financing in Africa, closed the session. The Economics of Health for All strategy, he said, has five strategic directions, chosen because they are areas where the WHO can deliver results in a few years rather than the full agenda the Council on the Economics of Health for All first developed under Mariana Mazzucato.

Meessen was candid about the limits. “We don’t lead the world,” he said. He split the work into a normative agenda, repeating that GDP is not all that people value, and a positive agenda, proving the causal links between health and other dimensions with science. That evidence matters, he said, because the forces pushing back on these ideas are also dismantling the programmes that measure reality.

He ended on a note directed at the wider community: “We need you. We need member states, academia and civil society, because we need to unite.”

Source: socialprotection.org webinar, “Investing in future generations: Economics of Health for All” (27 August 2026), co-hosted by the Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health and UNRISD.