DLD Annual Lecture 2026 with Winnie Byanyima.

SOAS Development Leadership Dialogue presents the Annual Lecture 2026.

Please note that this event is in-person only at the Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre, SOAS.

Global economic rules are driving inequality on a remarkable scale – most starkly in medical science, where a minority can access cutting-edge medicines while much of the majority world cannot. The international institutions mandated to address this inequality have repeatedly clashed with global economic rules that embed it.  

The AIDS movement built an extraordinary model for access to medicines, combining pressure from social movements with law and policy action by majority-world governments, and a rights-based approach that has saved tens of millions of lives. Yet during COVID-19, that approach was abandoned, multilateralism failed to find an equitable solution, and global economic rules protected monopolies over lives. 

Today, amid a rupture in global geopolitics, there is an opportunity to fundamentally change the systems driving inequality. Indeed, there are nascent attempts to redress the structural barriers to health equity in the global economy. Some, like the Pandemic Agreement, have come against the same power imbalances. But national and regional actors are stepping up, finding new forms of cooperation, and capitalising on disruption to chart a new path . 

Drawing on the history of the AIDS movement and the wider struggle for global justice, Winnie Byanyima will outline how the majority world can seize this moment to upend the global imbalances that hold back health and development. 

Speaker

• Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of UNAIDS