Attention has been drawn recently to both the German and the Japanese contributions and influence on global health through their respective chairing of the 2015 G7 Elmau Summit and the 2017 G20 Hamburg Summit, and the 2016 G7 Ise-Shima Summit. The heads of government have shown great personal commitment, ensuring that global health constituted a significant part of the Summit agenda. Both countries also have adopted a global health strategy. They have cooperated following the G7 and the G20 Summit, and preparing for the 2019 G20 Osaka Summit.

Both Japan and Germany are late comers to the global health arena, but have been playing an increasingly important role over the last two decades, both as donors and as agenda setters. New models of global health appear in this period (often termed the "golden age of global health"), and it would seem important to assess what roles the two countries have played in setting a new global health agenda and in providing financing for major initiatives - and most importantly why they made these choices. In a world dominated by anglophone global health research and publications, this has not received the analytical attention that it should.

In this symposium, in the first session, we will review what was achieved and what still remains as outstanding issues at the 2017 G20 Hamburg, and try to learn lessons for Japan that will host the G20 Summit in 2019. In the second session, as emerging economies play an increasingly important role for global health, we will try to learn what emerging donor countries that constitute the G20 Group expect to achieve at the G20 Summit. Then, we will discuss how Germany and Japan can support that process. In the third session, we will explore how Germany and Japan can put global health in the G7 and G20 agenda at various points in time, in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.