It’s Time for All of Us to Deliver

Last month, I joined 8,000 people from 165 countries in Vancouver, BC to participate in the Women Deliver 2019 Conference. Held only every three years, this four-day gathering is the world’s largest conference on gender equality, and the health, rights, and wellbeing of girls and women.

The energy at this conference was palpable and illustrates the power of uniting across women’s issues. Inviting strategists, practitioners, and supporters into one space to coordinate efforts and create synergy among leaders and organizations reduces silos and increases opportunity for collaboration. Rather than separating out reproductive rights, maternal health, and gender equity – to name a few major areas of concern – these issues were all brought together at WD 2019 and examined.

Women are complex, multi-faceted humans who face a confluence of issues. Our response to these issues must address this complexity and be holistic in nature. Infant mortality, access to women’s healthcare, and the agency of adolescent girls are not discrete problems to solve. WD 2019 not only acknowledged and highlighted some of our most pressing collective issues, it pushed all of us to mobilize for change.

There is great power in engaging with a spectrum of women – all ages, orientations, cultural backgrounds – coming together to address systemic issues. At WD 2019, the voices of girls were amplified. Today’s young women are ready to serve and to lead their communities, and they accept no excuses for inaction. With advocates such as Natasha Wang Mwansa, Girls Be Heard, and the Young Leaders Program, this generation, backed by the experience and wisdom of the women who came before, will be agents of positive social and economic change for women.

And now, the conference has ended. The conversation continues in boardrooms, in health clinics, on email, and via social media. It’s time for the data and the conversation to lead to action.

Following the Women Deliver conference, I spent a week in Lilongwe, Malawi, where Kati Collective is working with the Global Financing Facility to provide support to the countries in their portfolio. The GFF, whose portfolio of countries has grown to 36, is a tangible way that funding is being targeted to the many health priorities for women and girls. As funders, such as Canada, make ever deeper investments in this work, definite and defined actions to effect change are becoming more and more possible.

Additionally, I’m impressed by the White Ribbon Alliance’s promise to not just listen to women’s needs and demands for quality reproductive and maternal health care (read their report What Women Want), but they have pledged to act upon them. Let’s all join them in that pledge.

We talked, we studied, we collected, we determined. Now, we deliver.

And we improve the world for women and girls.

Together.

Image: WD 2019 delegates from Deliver for Good, a global campaign that applies a gender lens to the Sustainable Development Goals and promotes 12 critical investments in girls and women to power progress for all. Photo: Suzanne Rushton.