Building what comes next
By 2025, the systems that had housed decades of progress on gender equality were crumbling. Movements had secured extraordinary gains within them, but those systems were not built to serve the majority of girls, women, and gender-diverse people. As funding contracted and political opposition intensified, their underlying weaknesses became impossible to ignore.
The current crisis is exposing deep weaknesses in the gender equality ecosystem—and creating an opening to reshape it.
The ecosystem already has strong movements, evidence, ideas, and leadership. The missing piece is connective capacity: sustained relationships and structures that bring these strengths together, align efforts across issues and geographies, and translate them into action at scale.
Women Deliver’s 2025–2030 Strategy sets out how we will respond. Building on two decades as a trusted convener, we are deepening and expanding our role as a catalytic organization: connecting feminist movements with governments, philanthropy, the private sector, and other actors; building political alignment around a shared vision; and creating the conditions for sustained collective action.
What is a catalytic organization?
Complex challenges require coordinated action across movements, institutions, sectors, and regions. Catalytic organizations create the conditions for an ecosystem to act with greater alignment, shared purpose, and collective power. They strengthen the connections, political direction, and shared structures that move diverse actors from fragmented efforts to sustained action.
A shared vision for change
The Melbourne Declaration for Gender Equality, co-created with more than 900 people across every region of the world, is the current expression of our vision for ecosystem change. It gives diverse actors a shared political direction and a foundation for collective action.
Our vision
A gender-just world where all girls, women, and gender-diverse people have control over their bodies and lives.
Our mission
Catalyze and convene the gender equality ecosystem to spark political imagination and encourage systemic change. We do this by:
- Reorienting the ecosystem around States’ obligations to all people—especially girls, women, and gender-diverse people—by moving away from replacing national governments and toward actively supporting and strengthening governments to meet their human rights obligations.
- Rebalancing power so feminist movements and civil society with direct links to those most affected by injustice have the space, safety, access, legitimacy, and power to hold States and institutions to account.
Our role as a catalytic organization
Women Deliver’s leadership is relational and political. We draw on two decades of relationships, convening power, political insight, and connections across otherwise fragmented parts of the ecosystem to help diverse actors find common purpose, build political will, and advance collective action.
We create space for movements, States, funders, institutions, and allies to align around shared political goals while preserving their distinct roles and autonomy. Our contribution is the connective capacity that helps shared vision become sustained, accountable action.
The Melbourne Declaration in action
This approach is apparent in three areas where Women Deliver has established credibility, relationships, and the potential to help drive structural change: adolescent girls’ rights, global health, and climate.
These areas are examples of the Melbourne Declaration in action—showing how shared political direction, stronger connections, and collective action can help advance gender equality across issues and geographies. They do not define the limits of our work; we will continue to engage with partners and opportunities across the broader gender equality ecosystem.
How we will work
Guided by the Melbourne Declaration, we will advance this work through three interconnected pathways. Together, they provide a framework for measuring and tracking progress through 2030.
Ignite interest and political will
We will spark imagination, rally new and existing partners, and build the momentum needed to shift narratives, strengthen political will, and inspire collective action around the Melbourne Declaration’s vision and our issue areas.
Build the infrastructure to plan and execute the vision
We will work with partners to build and resource the relationships, structures, and systems needed to gather and share learning, improve alignment, coordinate action, and strengthen accountability across the ecosystem.
Convene the ecosystem and partners
We will bring diverse partners together at powerful, defining moments that advance the Melbourne Declaration’s political goals, inspire lasting imagination and commitment, and accelerate transformation. This includes Women Deliver Conferences, strategic engagement in other global spaces, and targeted thematic and regional convenings between major moments.
By 2030, we want to see a gender equality ecosystem with stronger, well-resourced structures for collaboration, shared learning, crisis coordination, and accountability. Feminist movements and civil society will hold greater power; States will be supported and held accountable to meet their obligations; and diverse actors will be better able to work together toward a shared vision for gender justice.
The gender equality ecosystem
The gender equality ecosystem refers to the wider field of movements, institutions, actors, and policy spaces working to advance gender equality worldwide. This includes feminist movements, women’s rights organizations, organizations of persons with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ organizations, youth-led and youth-serving organizations, grassroots and locally led groups, governments, multilateral institutions, development agencies, philanthropy, international financial institutions, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), researchers, advocates, service providers, policy actors, and allies.
These actors hold different levels of power; together, they shape what becomes possible for gender equality globally.
