22nd March 2026 — If solidarity is one of the most frequently invoked words in global health, it is also one of the hardest to define. That was the challenge at the heart of the Global Health Solidarity Project’s first webinar of 2026, themed “What Difference Does Solidarity Make? Emerging Insights from a Global Qualitative Study,” where researchers from Western University presented emerging findings from a qualitative study spanning 75 interviews with civil society leaders, research institutes, and global health influencers across multiple WHO regions.
What made the session especially compelling was its starting point. Rather than beginning with abstract theory, the study asked what people across the global health ecosystem are actually calling solidarity in practice. As Prof. Elysée Nouvet put it:
“Our team has referred to these as Core Characteristics of Solidarity, solidarities with an ‘S’ quite intentionally, because what emerges in this analysis is that there are patterns, but also what people are calling solidarity sometimes includes, references and is associated with different implications for practice and transformation in particular.”
That plurality became the webinar’s unique strength. Instead of offering yet another broad appeal for “more solidarity,” the session grounded the conversation in lived accounts from across positions of power, practice, and community leadership. From that diversity, the team identified three recurring characteristics: solidarity is rooted in shared goals and interconnected responsibilities, it requires action, and it is transformative.
Hannah Healey took up the first two characteristics by returning to the webinar’s central question: what difference does solidarity actually make? Her answer was simple, but demanding:
“The answer, we argue, starts with what people commit to together.”
Across the interviews, solidarity was not described as vague togetherness, but as “mutual responsibility and commitment towards collectively agreed-upon goals and objectives.” In one participant’s words, solidarity is “a mutually accepted and shared responsibility to reach a commonly agreed-upon goal.”
That finding mattered because it pushed back against a thinner understanding of solidarity as goodwill alone. Participants repeatedly insisted that solidarity requires more than shared feeling. Healey noted a “very deep skepticism towards solidarity as a mere declaration alone,” explaining that people “pushed back, sometimes quite forcefully, against the idea that solidarity is simply an expression of goodwill or shared feeling.” What makes the difference, she said, is not declaration but practice: “participants viewed declaration as not making a difference, but action does make a difference to them.”
This was one of the webinar’s most resonant moments. In a global health landscape where the language of solidarity can be easy to invoke but hard to verify, the study’s participants drew a clear line: words without action risk emptying the term of meaning.
The third characteristic — solidarity as transformative — gave the session some of its richest insights. Nouvet noted that participants described solidarity not only as improving outcomes, but as changing how global health work is done. Transformation, the participants suggested, is not only material but also relational and institutional, reshaping how people “related, listened, and worked together” through more “non-hierarchical, respectful, and reciprocal ways of working.”
Dr. Mary Ntochukwu Ndu built on this by presenting solidarity not as a fixed idea, but as a layered and evolving process. In her framing, shared goals and interdependence ground solidarity, action activates it, and transformation sustains it.
“Solidarity operates as both a process and an outcome, changing systems while reshaping those who participate in it.”
Referring to the solidarity model presented during the session, Dr. Ndu explained that solidarity begins with recognising that health challenges, social inequities, and global crises are interconnected and require collective responses. Over time, repeated action produces transformation, though this looks different across contexts. At community level, solidarity can foster empowerment and mutual support; within institutions, it can reshape governance and redistribute power; and at global level, it can influence policy priorities and challenge existing power relations.
That emphasis on power made the webinar especially timely. The discussion, moderated by Prof. Caesar Atuire, did not romanticize solidarity as harmony. Instead, it highlighted how differently stakeholders understand what solidarity should demand. Prof. Nouvet acknowledged that many interviewees framed solidarity as a critique of “structural and systemic inequities” and of the distribution of “power, resources, control” over the conditions that produce health injustice. But she also resisted reducing solidarity to any single ideology or level of disruption. For some, solidarity means “more space is made to consult and include organizations with historically less voice.” For others, it must go further by challenging “who controls the space, the time, the invitation,” and even the outcomes of collaboration.
In that sense, the webinar’s biggest contribution may have been its insistence that solidarity cannot be separated from questions of method, authority, and process. Prof. Atuire captured the significance of the discussion in his closing remarks, describing the findings as “quite rich” and saying they help us “get closer to an understanding of what solidarity is and what solidarity can do.”
That, perhaps, was the webinar’s clearest value. In a field crowded with moral language, it offered something rarer: evidence-based insight into how solidarity is actually recognised, expected, contested, and practised. Not solidarity as slogan, but solidarity as lived and argued-over reality.
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