Investing in Every Child's Future: Building a Stronger Ecosystem for Children's Health Innovation (Community-Led Roundtable)
CGI partners will host dynamic, high-level discussions on impact-focused challenges at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) 2026 Annual Meeting.
Investing in Every Child's Future: Building a Stronger Ecosystem for Children's Health Innovation
Children's health needs continue to outpace the research, innovation, and investment directed toward them, leading to poorer health outcomes, unnecessary suffering, and avoidable deaths for children around the world. Though children make up roughly a quarter of the world's population, pediatric health receives a disproportionately small share of research funding and institutional support, despite clear evidence that early investment drives lifelong benefits for wellness, economic productivity, and health equity across societies.
This roundtable will explore practical opportunities to address the structural barriers that leave children overlooked in research and innovation, strengthen pathways from identifying unmet need through discovery, development and implementation, and consider how policy, partnerships, incentives, infrastructure and different forms of capital can work together to accelerate solutions and ensure they reach children equitably — building a stronger, more connected ecosystem for children's health. Participants will also examine innovative financing and investment models, such as UNICEF's child-lens investing framework, and explore examples of these approaches in action that move beyond mobilizing capital to creating new models for connection, collaboration, and shared action. Ultimately, the conversation will aim to surface action-oriented solutions that advance a shared goal: making children's health a societal, economic, and innovation priority.
When: Wednesday, September 23 from 3:15 - 4:15 p.m.
Where: Gramercy East & West, Second Floor, New York Hilton Midtown
Host: Rhian Thomas-Turner, Head of Pediatric Research Operations and Strategy, NHS Wales
RSVP: https://luma.com/2ti7cszb
Registration: To attend this session, you must also be registered for the CGI 2026 Annual Meeting. Please reach out to your CGI Contact if you have any questions or need help getting registered.
For questions about this Community-Led Roundtable, please reach out to Jenny Shapiro at jspairo@clintonfoundation.org.