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wo of the three candidates for the top post at the World Health Organization (WHO) have visited Indonesia, a diverse developing nation they regard as posing unique challenges while at the same time having the potential to participate more in global health.

They are British doctor David Nabarro and Pakistani cardiologist Sania Nishtar, who, along with former Ethiopian health minister Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, will have their candidacies for director-general of the world health body determined in a vote next month.

For Nabarro — who has 40 years of experience in over 50 countries, whether as a frontline medical doctor at the grass roots and in wars, as a teacher in UK universities or working at the top table in various international bodies, including the United Nations and the WHO — Indonesia is like “a miniature world.”

The Southeast Asian archipelagic country, where diverse communities live with a persistent infrastructure gap, has “the full range of challenges”, Nabarro said recently, pointing out risks stemmed from communicable diseases, lifestyle conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure, as well as a lack of access to health and malnutrition.

While Nishtar, who once served in a Pakistani interim federal cabinet overseeing public health, education and science, acknowledged that Indonesia posed a unique challenge to healthcare access.

“In a country where there are thousands of islands, geographic access is real a problem. And of course, the better the roads, the better the communication, the better the linkage, the better the access,” Nishtar said recently in a separate interview with The Jakarta Post.

In separate visits to Jakarta this month, the two candidates met with Indonesian officials, in apparent efforts to win over support from the government in next month’s WHO election, which comes at a crucial moment for the agency, which is struggling with internal reforms.

But, questions remain over what role Indonesia can better play in the world health body since the country is still facing health-related problems, particularly amid existing uneven access to health, although the government has been stepping up efforts in the past few years; and also what is in it for Indonesia if they are elected.

Nabarro said Indonesia could contribute more to the WHO, given the country’s experience in dealing with numerous health problems, particularly avian influenza.

“I want to make sure that the WHO serves Indonesia in the same way that Indonesia contributes to the health of the world,” said Nabarro, a special adviser to the UN secretary-general on the sustainable development agenda and climate change and who was the WHO’s crisis coordinator when the tsunami hit Aceh in 2004.

Commenting on Indonesia’s major strides in the pursuit of universal healthcare, Nishtar said the WHO could assist the country in developing its program, including by linking Indonesia with other countries that have advanced in the area.

The world body as a global standard-setting organization, she added, would also play a role in advancing health systems in Indonesia by effective dissemination of international standards in a contextual matter.

WHO reforms have certainly taken center stage in the campaigns of the two candidates ,who are familiar with the WHO’s complex systems and have past experience in health reform, with Nabarro once leading a high-level advisory group to guide reform of the WHO’s response to outbreaks and emergencies and Nishtar during her time in the Pakistani Cabinet.

For years, the WHO has been seeking to reform its structure, governance and financing system, as well as its emergency work, particularly following criticisms of its emergency response to the deadly 2014 Ebola crisis in West Africa. However, progress has been slow.

In her vision document, Nishtar said she would seek to bring with her experience to advance the organization into a more efficient, transparent and cohesive form that focused on collective solutions beyond national boundaries. While Nabarro said he would bring about effective and transparent participatory WHO management aimed at building better trust with countries, communities and people across the world.

At the World Health Assembly in late May, the 194 member states of the WHO will select one among the three nominees — previously short-listed by the WHO executive board — as its new director-general, in a first ever one-state one-vote mechanism aimed at bringing fairness to the process. In the past, the assembly merely gave approval to a sole candidacy submitted by the executive board.