“Together we move a mountain”: celebrating a decade of the Emerging Voices for Global Health network

An explicit eye for candidates who have a history of critical policy and/or community engagement and ensuring a mix in each cohort of gender, geographical regions and nature of experience with health systems has guided the selection in addition to academic excellence and achievements. Under the leadership of various global health actors and the WHO Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research, efforts were being made to bring together a society of practitioners of health policy and systems research.1 The global HPSR community grew from strength-to-strength and eventually launched a society of its own, Health Systems Global (HSG). A biennial global symposium is hosted by HSG as a platform for exchange and community-building, with an explicit focus on people-centred health systems, action on social inequalities by addressing the social and political determinants of health, engaging with a wide variety of biomedical, social science and humanities approaches to strengthening health systems and leadership embedded in the global south. Some have become elected members of the HSG board, and others have taken the lead in managing other thematic working groups within HSG, and many others participate actively in other regional and global events while coordinating with fellow EV4GH alumni in such fora, leveraging the membership in the network to seek wider change in the health systems and global health community.