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Women Deliver^[1] is a global feminist organization for girls and women. The organization has gender equality advocates from all levels for two decades. While the organization is best known for it's power, it's expertise encompasses advocacy for gender equality.

Women Deliver knows that its sector is deeply intertwined with and marred by colonial and racist power structures, ideals, and practices. The organization remains steadfast in its commitment to recognize, challenge, and dismantle these practices, aiming to shape a future where its work not only mirrors its feminist values but also contributes to dismantling the systems that oppress all girls and women.

Women Deliver has endeavored positive change for gender equality.^[2] The organization prides itself on its deep knowledge of global spaces, conferences that bring together advocates to establish norms and standards. With this understanding, Women Deliver aims to navigate these complex systems, gain access, and ultimately, change whose voices are heard within them, particularly by emphasizing meaningful engagement with young people and supporting collective action to advance the health and rights of girls and women globally.

Throughout its history, Women Deliver has strived to promote gender equality worldwide by championing the sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) of girls and women. Known for its convening power, especially highlighted by Women Deliver Conferences. The first Women Deliver Conference, held in London to mark the 20th anniversary of the Safe Motherhood Initiative, brought new ammunition to the case for investing in maternal and newborn health. It intensified efforts to get maternal health on the global development agenda.

Since its inception, the organization has expanded and deepened its expertise in global advocacy for gender equality, specifically in areas such as navigating and utilizing global spaces, and leveraging brand influence to instigate change. Women Deliver is addressing the harmful aspects of its past and altering its practices to ensure a future where its actions reflect and actively contribute to the feminist values it holds, building upon their success.

Women Deliver on Adolescent Girls: The organization believes that transforming the life trajectory of adolescent girls is key to making a significant leap forward in gender equality, as these girls face the greatest risk of having their life choices limited, their bodies controlled, and being subjected to harmful coping strategies in response to various crises. Ensuring their health and rights is seen as not only the right action but the most effective strategy to overcome barriers to achieving a gender-equal world.

Women Deliver's Focus on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights: Women Deliver aims to deliver SRHR impact that transcends borders and challenges, advocating for a comprehensive, integrated set of human rights already recognized in international treaties, consensus documents, and national laws worldwide. These rights encompass an individual's access to necessary information for making informed decisions about their sexuality without coercion, discrimination, or violence, including the right to the highest standard of physical and mental health and access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services.

Women Deliver is renowned for its convening power, having hosted six global conferences since its first in London in 2007, which have collectively brought together over 30,000 global advocates, experts, decision-makers, and leaders in gender equality.^[3]

The organization's convening power has grown, marking significant milestones in advancing gender equality and SRHR globally. Through its convenings, Women Deliver has broadened and deepened its expertise in global advocacy for gender equality, navigating global spaces, resourcing young change-makers, supporting coalitions and movements, and leveraging brand influence for change. These efforts successfully unite gender equality advocates at all levels of power for meaningful programming to advance real change for gender equality worldwide.

Women Deliver Conferences have become key global spaces where gender narratives and norms are shaped, the gender equality movement is strengthened, and solidarity and momentum are built. Through the power of convening, Women Deliver has extensive expertise in bridging the gap between traditionally marginalized voices and decision-makers in global spaces, driving advancements for gender equality, especially in emphasizing sexual and reproductive health and rights globally. The organization looks forward to continuing this work at the next Women Deliver Conference in 2026.

Youth advocates are the driving force toward a more equitable future, with young people already making significant impacts in their communities, countries, and globally, bringing unique perspectives, expertise, and lived experiences. As stakeholders in the planet's future, they deserve a leading role in policies and programs that affect them, their communities, and the world.^[4]

For over a decade, Women Deliver has supported youth advocacy by providing tools and resources for young leaders to advocate for the changes they wish to see related to SRHR. The organization's Emerging Leaders for Change Program builds on this experience, emphasizing investment in Emerging Leaders who are closest to their communities and the needs of adolescent girls, ensuring that solutions to challenges in girls’ and women's SRHR are youth-centered and address local contexts' specific needs and nuances.

Who are Emerging Leaders?

Emerging Leaders, defined as SRHR advocates aged 15–29 at the beginning stages of their advocacy journey, form a vast movement alongside Young Leader Alumni and youth advocates to advance and support the fight for bodily autonomy. These youth leaders play a critical role in holding governments accountable for delivering on SRHR in universal health coverage plans, ensuring a gender-just approach in climate adaptation measures, and safeguarding SRHR. Despite often being overlooked by decision-makers, Emerging Leaders' expertise and lived experiences are crucial for achieving bodily autonomy for adolescent girls. Women Deliver is committed to elevating their voices and solutions, recognizing them as experts and leaders in SRHR and enabling their access to decision-making roles and spaces.

Women Deliver invests in Emerging Leaders through grantmaking, collective action, political engagement, learning and knowledge-sharing, technical assistance, access to global spaces, and speaker, media, and leadership opportunities. With a proven track record of advocating for youth leadership and equitable partnerships within SRHR and climate justice decision-making and influencing spaces, the organization builds on over a decade of work with young advocates through the Young Leaders Program, supporting feminist movements, activists, and advocates working to protect and advance the health and rights of adolescent girls and to create a vibrant ecosystem of advocacy organizations that will continue to push for social change for many years to come.

Women Deliver's Collective Action for Change program underscores Women Deliver's commitment to harnessing the transformative power of alliances, partnerships, and coalitions to propel gender equality and safeguard girls’ and women's rights, especially during adolescence.^[5]

The organization forms and collaborates in feminist coalitions and alliances to advance SRHR and protect bodily autonomy, focusing on ensuring gender justice and SRHR in the face of the climate crisis, advancing SRHR in universal health coverage, and countering the global anti-rights movement.

Recognized as an accredited organization with the United Nations, World Health Organization, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Women Deliver has a seat at the table with decision-makers, seizing opportunities to influence global spaces to advance SRHR.

Coalitions, alliances, and global partnerships are among Women Deliver's key and most impactful strategies, uniting advocates and allies around global moments for change to support better alignment efforts, avoid duplication, connect existing solutions, shift collaborative practices to redirect power, build consensus, and advocate more effectively for changes that reflect the context and lived experiences within these feminist coalitions and alliances.

Numerous factors influence adolescent girls’ access to sexual and reproductive health care and services. With 15 years of technical knowledge and expertise in driving sustainable change, Women Deliver has identified three critical issues that demand immediate attention and action:

The Climate Crisis^[6]

The climate crisis is not gender-neutral. It disproportionately affects those who have contributed the least to it, particularly adolescent girls, women, gender-diverse people, and marginalized groups. The climate crisis significantly threatens sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), as climate-related disasters destroy essential infrastructure critical to accessing SRH services, degrade natural resources adding additional care burden for women and adolescent girls, and prompt harmful coping strategies like withdrawing girls from school and pushing them into early and forced marriages to manage with unforeseen economic hardships.

The ‘climate community’ often operates in ways that overlook the gendered aspects of mitigation and adaptation strategies, while the ‘gender-equality community’ has failed to gain significant traction due to the priority given to technocratic strategies. Women Deliver firmly advocates for the integration of gendered dimensions and SRHR into climate resilience strategies, emphasizing increased SRHR investments as a response to the climate crisis.

Through global advocacy and partnerships, Women Deliver aims to influence climate policies and foster gender equality and SRHR in the climate context, and strengthen the active involvement of traditionally ignored voices, such as adolescent girls and their advocates, in global norm-setting processes. Future plans include forming research consortia, developing gender-informed climate resilience frameworks, and launching campaigns to underscore the importance of SRHR investments in addressing climate impacts on women and girls.

Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) in Universal Health Coverage (UHC)^[7]

Universal Health Coverage (UHC) aims to ensure everyone can access quality health services without financial hardship, covering all essential health services throughout an individual's lifetime. As a cornerstone of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, UHC targets achieving comprehensive health coverage by 2030.The inclusion of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) is vital for realizing UHC and promoting health for all. SRHR encompasses a broad spectrum of human rights that are fundamental for making informed decisions about one's sexuality and for accessing SRH services.  Access to SRH services has not kept pace with demand, particularly affecting girls, women, and gender-diverse people. In particular, adolescent girls encounter significant barriers to accessing quality SRH services, influenced by negative attitudes, stigma, and legal barriers, which have lasting impacts on their well-being and future potential. Achieving UHC requires the explicit integration of accessible, quality SRH services and the recognition of the full suite of reproductive rights. The increasing trend of de-normalizing these services or ‘neglecting’ specific areas, such as SRHR of adolescent girls, within national UHC laws and policies is of grave concern. The reversal of this trend is a significant priority for Women Deliver.  

Through advocacy and strategic partnerships, Women Deliver seeks to influence global policies and frameworks to prioritize SRHR within UHC, with a particular focus on ensuring access to high-quality SRH services for adolescent girls. Women Deliver's future efforts will focus on holding governments accountable for their UHC commitments, advocating for the inclusion of robust SRHR language in global UHC spaces, and leveraging platforms like the Women Deliver Conference to support traditionally ignored voices to advance SRHR within UHC frameworks.  

Countering the Anti-Rights Movement^[8]

Recent decades have witnessed the rise of a powerful coalition opposing human rights, democracy, and the rule of law, specifically targeting what they term as "gender ideology." This movement, with significant financial backing, has particularly focused on undermining the bodily autonomy and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) of girls and women. From 2008 to 2017, "anti-gender" groups based in the United States saw their revenue soar to US $6.2 billion, with at least US $1 billion of this funding directed globally to support anti-gender initiatives. Their growing influence has led to the adoption of regressive policies across the globe and has allowed them to penetrate global forums, aiming to silence voices advocating for SRHR.

The danger these anti-rights movements present to the advancement of global SRHR is significant. They use their United Nations access to push conservative interpretations of human rights that undermine SRHR, such as access to safe abortion and comprehensive sexuality education (CSE). Through collective action and partnerships, Women Deliver seeks to form coalitions against anti-rights narratives, supporting and amplifying youth as a key advocacy strategy to counter anti-rights groups’ tactics. Future strategies focus on engaging diverse stakeholders to build a unified movement to protect and advance SRHR, advocating for inclusive state endorsement of SRHR in international frameworks, and developing principles to counteract anti-rights movements at the Women Deliver Conference in 2026.  

For almost 20 years, Women Deliver has worked to advance gender equality worldwide by advocating for the SRHR of girls and women. In 2007, Women Deliver organized its first conference, contributing to the successful advancement of MDG 5 — Improve Maternal Health — within the global development agenda. Since then, the organization has expanded and deepened its expertise in global advocacy for gender equality.^[9]

Key examples of Women Deliver's impact include:

• Hosting and organizing more than 250 catalytic convenings, including six Women Deliver Conferences, strategic policy moments, workshops, and knowledge-sharing sessions. These initiatives have reached people in at least 170 countries and six continents.
• Fueling over $1 billion in global and country-level investments for gender equality by creating commitment processes at Women Deliver Conferences.
• Influencing 120 policy and financial processes, including 20 global initiatives, 20 national processes in Kenya and Senegal alone, and 80 country-specific processes identified by Young Leaders since 2017.
• Investing nearly $1 million to support country-level coalition-led advocacy and feminist movement-building in Kenya and Senegal.  
• Advancing five cohorts of Young Leaders, resulting in:
  • 931 Young Leader Program Alumni from 147 countries over the last 13 years.
  • Disbursing over $1 million to Young Leaders through 213 small-scale grants across 40 countries.
  • Supporting hundreds of country and regional advocacy initiatives led by Young Leaders through profile building and material support.

In June 2020, four former employees of Women Deliver publicly shared their experiences of racial discrimination, bias, and a negative work environment both at Women Deliver and within the broader international development sector through a series of tweets. Their revelations prompted Young Leaders and Alumni of Women Deliver to issue a letter of solidarity, calling for action to rectify the cited concerns. In response, the Board of Women Deliver initiated an independent investigation, which concluded that the organization's systems and structures had not lived up to its stated values.^[10]

The revelations of 2020 served as a catalyst for profound changes within Women Deliver.^[11] The organization undertook a thorough review and overhaul of its operational practices, communication strategies, and partnerships, driven by the goal of integrating feminist and anti-racist principles into the core of its actions, both internally and externally. The organization's evolution over the course of the past several years reflects its steadfast commitment to addressing and rectifying the deep-seated challenges posed by colonial and racist power structures within the international development sector. Through intentional action, Women Deliver aims to not only acknowledge the organization's past, but to pave the way for a more inclusive and effective path forward.