How Health Journalists Communicate Global Health Impacts
In 2025, health systems around the world faced many disruptions when changes to U.S. foreign aid policy led to the freezing, cancelling, and clawback of billions of dollars in global health funding. In December, the Pulitzer Center hosted a virtual workshop titled “Communicating the Global Impact of U.S. Policies,” inviting four Pulitzer grantees to speak about their reporting on the impact of aid cuts in Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda and discuss how journalists are covering the issue. The event was held as part of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health’s Virtual Global Health Week.
The panel emphasized that while it’s up to scientists to illuminate the health impacts of the cuts on a global or population level, conveying what’s happening on a human level—“That task falls to journalists,” said panelist and moderator Brian Simpson.
Across the board, the panel found acute impacts to health care providers, communities, and health researchers. In Ghana, aid cuts caused medicine stockouts in clinics, hampered the country’s ability to respond to a deadly meningitis outbreak, and halted local malaria research. In Kenya and Uganda, funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) was frozen for a time, then reinstated with severe cuts. New restrictions on funding have caused key populations, such as sex workers and LGBTQ+ people, to lose access to medication, education, and condoms, all of which help prevent transmission of HIV.
The reported impacts echoed some of the audience’s top concerns for global health: that aid cuts would cause unnecessary loss of life, decrease trust in health systems, reverse scientific progress, and negatively impact health infrastructure including health workers, education, research, and multilateral partnerships.
But despite the complex web of challenges, the panelists also found remarkable resilience. They found the health response was shifting away from government-supported programs and toward smaller, more local operations and NGOs. Hospitals were experimenting with new innovations and methods of financing, such as seeking out more private donors, increasing revenue by doing more services, and renting out machines and human capital. Panelist Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson also spoke about health systems trying to forge paths to self-sufficiency with technology, such as using algorithms for predicting sepsis and producing drugs locally—though some of these projects may languish without continued funding.
Highlighting resilience and not just the negative impacts should be a key part of journalistic reporting on this issue, the panelists emphasized. Instead of approaching impacted communities as victims, journalists should show how people are rising to the occasion. This may involve doing further research, finding other viewpoints, and challenging one’s own assumptions about foreign aid and dependency.
The panelists also discussed how to reach across the aisle to communicate about polarized issues. Panelist Molly Raskin recommended presenting the facts and letting people form their own opinions. Panelist Ridwan Dini-Osman suggested framing stories as forward-looking rather than aiming to spark debate. Cavanaugh Simpson advocated for putting a human face on the issue and finding universal touchpoints that people can relate to. For example, Cavanaugh Simpson told the story of a woman in Uganda who turned to sex work as a result of poverty and lack of opportunity. She was the mother of a young son, sent nearly all her earnings back home to pay for his school fees, and dreamed of starting a chicken farm. Due to the USAID cuts, the brothel she worked at was no longer supplied with condoms. Now, when the men don’t have condoms, “We just give in,” the woman told Simpson and Cavanaugh Simpson. The woman’s motherhood and her hopes for herself and her son became an emotional entry point through which people could feel the impact of the aid cuts.
Finally, the panel stressed the importance of bringing the global back to the local. Why should the people at home care about global health issues abroad? Illustrating how diseases cross borders, how pandemics affect the global economy, and how scientific discoveries and innovations can be shared around the world—connecting the dots from global to local—can help audiences better understand and relate to global health issues.
Communicating about global health now feels political in ways it hasn’t felt before, but reaching people who may have different views is more important than ever. Scientists and communicators must work together to rebuild trust in public health, health programs, and institutions so that we can reverse some of the negative impacts and continue making global health progress. To learn more about how governments, organizations, and other actors work together to respond to global health problems, check out our resource pack on Global Governance and Health. To learn more about communicating global health issues, explore our resource packs on Storytelling and Science Communication.
The Global Health Education and Learning Incubator at Harvard University supports interdisciplinary education about world health through the production, curation, and dissemination of educational public goods. Our digital repository is a searchable library of reputable resources that support learning and teaching about interdisciplinary global health challenges. The repository includes both general resources, such as reports, articles, country profiles, and data, and teaching resources, such as teaching cases and lesson-based teaching packs.