Global Center for Health Diplomacy & Inclusion

Who gets a seat, and who gets briefed

A lot of global health is decided in a small number of rooms in Geneva. Who's in them, who's been briefed before the session opens, and whether a group of countries turns up with one shared position or thirty separate ones.

CeHDI exists to change the answer to that. Their vision is easy to say and hard to reach. Every government meeting its obligations on the Right to Health, so that all people, women and girls in particular, get the highest standard of care available.

They're not short on credibility either. The founding team brought decades of multilateral health experience with them, plus a working relationship with HeDPAC, which acts as CeHDI's implementation arm across Africa and the Caribbean. What they had was a mission that matters and the network to pursue it.

A mission with nothing to hand over

What they didn't have was anything to leave behind after a meeting.

No website. No name recognition, and no single sentence an ambassador could repeat to a colleague over coffee. When you're a few months old and asking for the attention of diplomats, health ministers and multilateral staff, all of whom have a full calendar and a long memory, that becomes a problem. Everyone you need already knows who they take seriously.

So we asked ourselves, how do you make a brand new foundation sound like it belongs in the room?

Not by starting with a logo. We started with the argument, because with nothing underneath it, a brand simply makes a new organisation look newer.

Finding the health equity gap

We spent real time with the team going through the sector. Who already occupies this space, what they're brilliant at, and where there is space for an org like CeHDI.

The gap turned out to be specific. Plenty of organisations do excellent research. Others deliver services. Very few work as a platform that unifies the diplomatic voice of Global South governments and builds the capacity of the people doing the negotiating.

That became a single strategy statement CeHDI could use anywhere, with three pillars underneath it. Collaborative diplomacy, strategic advocacy, and capacity building. Each one carries objectives and real activities, from harmonising positions between like-minded countries to leadership programmes for Geneva-based ambassadors. All of it maps to SDG 3.

The most useful conversations were about scope. CeHDI isn't a research institute, isn't a service provider, and isn't a Western organisation speaking on behalf of the Global South. Ruling those out made everything after it easier to design.

Then we turned the strategy into the two things a young foundation needs, a formal business plan and an introductory presentation. The documents you send before a meeting and leave behind after it.

Then the brand

With the positioning settled, the identity had something to sit on.

The mark draws on an abstract antibody form, paired with an accent red and a deep navy that works in multiple shades. This is an organisation that will publish charts and policy analysis for years, so the palette had to hold up in data visualisation, not just on a homepage.

The public line, "Bridging borders for global health equity", came straight out of the strategy rather than a naming session.

The digital thinking had one constraint we loved. If you're arguing for inclusion, your website should load for the people you're including. So it's designed to be light and low-carbon, to work on a 3G connection, and to grow into more than one language. On inclusion generally, we pushed for showing over stating. Publish with Global South institutions. Name the partnerships. Use imagery from the places the work concerns. Although this engagement focused on strategic work and brand, the fundamentals for a digital presence were outlined.

What's grown around it

The brand hasn't been fully rolled out. A legacy version of the identity and site are live, and the wider application across programmes, events and publications is still ahead of them.

What's grown around it in the meantime is the good bit. In February 2025 the South Centre announced a two-year project supported by CeHDI, with HeDPAC as an implementation arm, to advance the right to health including SRHR and improve access to medicines by amplifying Global South influence at the WHO, the Human Rights Council and other forums. CeHDI has published a Health & Rights Observatory and a set of UPR resources, built to get the right to health into Human Rights Council processes, treaty bodies and special procedures. The team has been briefing regional groups of ambassadors in Geneva directly.

That's diplomacy, and it's what the positioning was for. It gave CeHDI a consistent way to describe itself in every one of those conversations, and it gave the people in the room something concrete to react to.

What we're watching now is the Observatory. A foundation that publishes its own evidence this early is a foundation that gets invited back, and the full brand rollout will land on work that's already underway rather than on a promise. If that means Global South health priorities are harder to leave out of the next negotiation, we've done our job properly.