Experiential Learning in Global Health: Engaging with Multilateral Institutions in an Age of Rights Regression

Experiential learning opportunities are recognized to help students put classroom discussions into practice, build new peer networks, and challenge their own preconceptions about the roles of global structures and systems to advance health and wellbeing. After a pandemic-related hiatus, the University of Southern California Institute on Inequalities in Global Health returned to Geneva, Switzerland with students for two weeks at the time of the 2024 World Health Assembly to learn and engage with how global health governance plays out on an international stage. We brought eleven passionate and engaged USC Master's in Public Health (MPH) students whose interests covered a range of issues, including child and maternal nutrition, sexual and reproductive health and rights in conflict settings, mental health, and noncommunicable diseases, among many other topics. We spent two weeks meeting with inter-governmental organizations, international advocacy organizations, United Nations agencies, and joint funded programs, and our students built their own event schedule during the World Health Assembly to cover the health topics they were most interested in pursuing. Our aim was to have students engage with the complex interplay of health, law, and rights, and to see in real time how research and education inform policy, on local, national and global levels. As instructors and coordinators, we are convinced that the role of experiential learning has never been more important or influential. Multilateralism is under attack, and rights regressions are rampant. We found that fostering honest, content driven conversations with our organizational partners, and then having intense follow-up with our students, resulted in new perspectives- personally and professionally - which is likely to serve the work of the students in global health for the years to come. When the distance between classroom readings and the actual people steering global health can be bridged, university courses that center experiential learning offer the opportunity for emerging health leaders to truly understand the structures and systems in place, and better imagine their own roles in the fight for the right to health.