Boehringer Ingelheim and the WHO Foundation have launched a US$5m obesity collaboration with no countries named and no commitment to women. Women carry a larger share of the global obesity burden, and existing guidelines already show what a women-aware programme could check and report.
“Obesity and related metabolic diseases cannot be addressed effectively in isolation.” Shashank Deshpande, the Boehringer Ingelheim board member responsible for human pharma, said this when his company and the WHO Foundation launched a US$5m obesity collaboration on 24 September.
The WHO Foundation’s announcement covers obesity and related cardiovascular, kidney, liver and metabolic disease in resource-limited settings over three years. It names no countries and makes no reference to women, gender or sex. Women make up a majority of adults living with obesity worldwide, and obesity shapes their risks in pregnancy, heart disease and breast cancer. A programme that counts only total patients will struggle to show whether it reaches them.
A three-year plan with no named countries
The WHO Foundation says the funding will help countries prepare health systems to monitor and care for obesity. It will support long-term chronic care within primary healthcare and bring health and non-health sectors together. People living with noncommunicable diseases will be involved in policy discussions. The work supports WHO’s Acceleration Plan to Stop Obesity, adopted by member states in 2022 and running to 2030.
Anil Soni, chief executive of the WHO Foundation, said: “The scale and complexity of the obesity and metabolic health challenge calls for an integrated approach.”
No targets, partner countries or reporting commitments appear in the release. WHO’s obesity fact sheet, updated on 7 October, projects global costs of US$3 trillion a year by 2030 without action. Against that figure, US$5m over three years is small.
504 million women and 374 million men
About 1.1 billion people were living with obesity in 2024, according to WHO. Its fact sheet splits overweight by sex, at 45% of women and 44% of men, but gives no split for obesity itself.
The NCD Risk Factor Collaboration fills that gap. Its analysis for 2022, published in The Lancet with WHO, estimated that 504 million women and 374 million men were living with obesity. The rate among women more than doubled from 8.8% in 1990 to 18.5%, and among men it rose from 4.8% to 14.0%, Imperial College London said.
Africa shows a wider gap. A study in BMJ Global Health analysed 54 WHO surveys in 36 countries of the WHO African Region between 2003 and 2022. Obesity affected nearly 13.5% of women and just over 4.5% of men. After adjustment, women’s odds of obesity were almost five times men’s, the BMJ release said. The surveys excluded South Africa and covered only adults aged 18 to 69.
Girls are a partial exception. WHO puts overweight among 5 to 19 year olds at 19% of girls and 21% of boys in 2024. Adolescence is therefore a stage where prevention could still change the adult pattern for women.
Women’s health money went to pregnancy
The same weeks brought new funding labelled for women, all of it for maternal and reproductive care. At the World Health Summit in Berlin, the Gates Foundation and Wellcome Leap pledged US$100m to halve stillbirth rates in selected countries. Bangladesh and the European Investment Bank set out plans to redirect €250m into maternal, newborn and cancer services.
Both address long-standing gaps in maternal care. The one new chronic disease commitment of the period made no reference to women at all.
Pregnancy, the heart and breast cancer
Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, including pre-eclampsia, complicate 10 to 15% of pregnancies, a WHO release said on 8 October. WHO says women who have had these disorders face higher later-life risks of chronic hypertension, cardiovascular disease, stroke and kidney disease. That history is a signal any cardiometabolic programme could use.
WHO’s guideline on GLP-1 medicines, issued in December 2025, excludes pregnant women from its long-term treatment recommendation. Women of reproductive age therefore need care pathways that account for pregnancy planning.
The Lancet Commission on women and cardiovascular disease found in 2021 that heart disease caused 35% of deaths in women. It described the condition as “understudied, underrecognized, underdiagnosed, and undertreated” in women, as TCTMD reported. In August, four cardiology societies published a Fifth Universal Definition of Myocardial Infarction. It sets separate limits for women and men on troponin, a protein released when heart muscle is damaged, to avoid “under-recognition in females”. A programme on obesity-related heart disease that does not report by sex cannot show whether it closes that gap.
Obesity and alcohol together caused more than 250,000 breast cancer cases in 2022, according to IARC, the WHO cancer agency. The collaboration’s stated scope does not include cancer.
Chile and Mexico offer tested models
Chile requires warning labels on about 80% of processed foods. Mexico introduced a tax on sugary drinks in 2014, and consumption fell by about 7% within two years, Health Policy Watch reported in 2022. Both policies cover whole populations, and both could be evaluated separately for women and men.
Checks women can ask for after pregnancy and in primary care
WHO’s obesity fact sheet says health workers should routinely assess weight status and identify obesity early. It says people with obesity should be offered or referred to “comprehensive, person-centred multimodal chronic care”. WHO also recommends reaching a healthy weight before pregnancy and appropriate weight gain during it. Women can ask their clinic whether this kind of care is available locally.
In England, NICE guidance says women who have had a hypertensive disorder of pregnancy should be told it raises their later risk of hypertension and cardiovascular disease. It recommends that women who had pre-eclampsia are offered a review with a GP or specialist six to eight weeks after the birth. Mentioning a past pre-eclampsia diagnosis at later appointments gives a clinician that history.
Each of these checks relies on primary care services that funders such as the WHO Foundation could strengthen. The collaboration could report outcomes separately for women and men. It could link primary care records to antenatal and postnatal records, so a history of pre-eclampsia or gestational diabetes prompts follow-up. The WHO Foundation has not said whether it will publish sex-disaggregated results, and its partner countries, once named, could make that a condition of taking part.
This article is for information only and does not replace advice from a qualified health professional.
Header image: Artem Beliaikin on Unsplash