September 12 marks the International Day for South-South Cooperation, commemorating the 1978 Buenos Aires Plan of Action (BAPA). Forty-eight years later, its central proposition remains relevant: countries of the Global South can draw on their own knowledge, experience and innovations to address shared development challenges. Its principles of solidarity, equality and mutual benefit remain particularly pertinent to health. This year the Day is observed under the theme 'Solidarity Rising: Global Alliance for Inclusive and Innovative Development', and marks the launch of the Global Alliance for South-South and Triangular Cooperation, a platform intended to connect countries seeking solutions with partners able to contribute expertise and catalytic support.

 

The scale is significant. The Global South holds roughly 85% of the world's population, and the world remains off track on universal health coverage by 2030. According to WHO, 4.6 billion people were not fully covered by essential health services in 2023, and 2.1 billion faced financial hardship from out-of-pocket spending in 2022. Non-communicable diseases account for three-quarters of non-pandemic deaths globally, 73% of them in low- and middle-income countries, and around 92% of the world's 260,000 maternal deaths in 2023 occurred in low- and lower-middle-income countries. Climate change is compounding these vulnerabilities, and a projected shortage of 11 million health workers by 2030 will strain systems further.

 

Countries facing comparable constraints can learn from one another and adapt solutions to their own institutional and social realities. From primary healthcare and affordable medicines to digital health and emergency preparedness, countries of the South have accumulated valuable experience. The priority now is to move beyond one-off exchanges towards sustained partnerships that translate knowledge into implementation.

 

India's approach reflects this philosophy. At the 78th World Health Assembly in 2025, prime minister Narendra Modi observed that “India's approach offers replicable, scalable and sustainable models”, expressing India's willingness to share its learnings and best practices with the Global South. The offer built on the vision of 'One Earth, One Health' he had placed before the same forum in 2023, and on his argument that a healthy world rests on inclusion, an integrated vision and collaboration. 

 

What lends it weight is scale. Ayushman Bharat, the world's largest health insurance scheme, covers 580 million people and now extends to every Indian above the age of 70. Public pharmacies supply quality medicines well below market prices, and free telemedicine has enabled over 340 million consultations. Out-of-pocket expenditure as a share of total health spending has fallen significantly while government spending has risen. These are not pilots but systems operating at the scale of 1.4 billion people under real fiscal constraints, which is what makes them legible elsewhere in the South.

 

India has also moved from offering models to proposing structures. Its convening of the Voice of Global South Summit, grounded in the ethos of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, has given developing countries a platform to articulate common priorities. At the third Summit in August 2024, PM Modi proposed a Global Development Compact, founded on India's own development journey and shaped by priorities that Southern countries set for themselves: human-centric, multi-sectoral, and framed so as not to burden partner countries with debt in the name of development finance. Its health commitments speak directly to the gaps above: affordable and effective generic medicines for the Global South, and support for training drug regulators. India's record gives them substance. Under Vaccine Maitri, India supplied COVID-19 vaccines to close to a hundred countries; under Arogya Maitri it has partnered on hospitals, dialysis facilities, medicines and Jan Aushadhi centres in Africa and the Pacific; and the WHO Global Centre for Traditional Medicine in Jamnagar, the organization's first anywhere, is building an evidence base for traditional systems many Southern countries still rely on.

 

To realize this potential, institutions must convert knowledge into action: mechanisms to identify what works, assess where it can be adapted and measure results. Triangular cooperation can complement Southern-led partnerships by bringing financing and specialized expertise where required. The economic case reinforces the urgency. South-South merchandise trade grew from about US$500 billion in 1995 to US$6.8 trillion in 2025. In health, deeper cooperation can create regional markets, strengthen supply chains and generate skilled employment, allowing countries to become co-producers of solutions rather than recipients of them.

 

This is where DAKSHIN, the Global South Centre of Excellence hosted by the Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS), can play a distinctive role. DAKSHIN, the Development and Knowledge Sharing Initiative, is itself a product of this thinking: announced by PM Modi at the first Voice of Global South Summit in January 2023, on the reasoning that countries of the South have much to learn from one another's development experience, and inaugurated at the second Summit that November. Its mandate is to act as an accelerator and multiplier towards Agenda 2030, through cross-continental exchange of ideas, evidence-based policy frameworks, global public goods and peer learning.

 

Four contributions in health are within reach now. First, a curated repository of Southern health solutions, documented not as success stories but as implementable case studies, with costs, staffing assumptions and the conditions under which they transfer. Second, structured exchanges between health ministries, regulators and implementing agencies, so that adaptation is worked out between practitioners. Third, a standing health track within the annual conference of Global South research centres that PM Modi proposed at the second Summit. Fourth, partnership with the new Global Alliance for South-South and Triangular Cooperation, in which DAKSHIN can act as a Southern knowledge node matching country demand with technical partners and financing.

 

If South-South cooperation can turn knowledge into capability, it can advance health equity while building productive capacity and collective self-reliance. Nearly five decades on, this is how solidarity becomes a foundation for healthier populations and stronger economies across the South.