Agnès Soucat is the Director for Health Systems Governance and Financing at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland. Before joining WHO, she was Global Leader Service Delivery and Lead Economist at the World Bank. She previously was the Director for Human Development for the African Development Bank, where she was responsible for health, education, social protection and jobs for Africa, including 54 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb. She has over 25 years of experience in health and poverty reduction, covering more than 70 countries in Africa, Asia and Europe. She was a pioneer of several innovations in health care financing including community-based financing and performance-based financing and authored seminal publications on these topics. She is also the co-author of the World Development Report 2004 “Making Services Work for Poor People” and of the Lancet Commission report “Global Health 2035: a world converging within a generation”. She was commissioner of the recent Lancet and Rockefeller Commission on Planetary Health. She also did extensive work on the health labour market dynamics in Africa. Dr Soucat holds an MD and a Masters in Nutrition from the University of Nancy in France as well as a Master of Public Health and PhD in Health Economics from the Johns Hopkins University.