Plenary Program

• Change Calls Us Here: The Opening of the Women Deliver 2026 Conference

  April 27, 4:00 – 5:30 pm

  WD2026’s Opening Ceremony marks the beginning of the official Conference program.

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  The evening will set the tone for the days ahead, connect to our theme — Change Calls Us Here — and invite delegates to make the most of their time together.

  Grounded in the local community and honoring the Original Owners of the land, it will begin the Conference with determination, defiance, and joy.

  It will also reflect the high-level political commitment behind WD2026 and make clear that, even in this difficult global moment, many across our sector remain deeply committed to advancing justice.

  Women Deliver will introduce the Declaration for the international development sector — a shared call to rebuild systems so that governments can better deliver for girls, women, and gender-diverse people, with international actors strengthening public systems rather than standing in for them.

  Across the Conference, our plenaries will return to this core question: what must change so power, resources, and responsibility are better aligned to deliver justice.

• From Resistance to Renewal: Seizing the Moment to Build a Feminist Future

  April 28, 9:30 – 11:00 am

  This plenary will ground delegates in the realities of this moment: rising authoritarianism, growing attacks on rights, and shrinking resources.

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  People and organizations across sectors are resisting, responding, and refusing to accept that the current trajectory is inevitable.

  This session brings those realities into focus while setting out the broader challenge for WD2026: not only how to defend what is under threat, but how to move beyond approaches that are no longer fit for this moment.

  It looks ahead to what it will take to build a feminist future through bold strategies, collaboration across sectors, and new possibilities that can emerge when systems that were never built with girls and women at the center begin to crack or fall apart.

• Decolonization and Self-Determination: Indigenous Feminist Leadership

  April 28, 11:30 am – 1:00 pm

  This plenary places Indigenous feminist leadership where it belongs — not as consultation, but as a source of authority, political direction, and accountability.

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  Colonization is not only part of the past; it remains an ongoing system that continues to shape land, law, development, climate responses, and governance.

  This session asks what it would mean for institutions, movements, and global actors to take self-determination seriously in the new system we want to create. It will culminate in a shared commitment moment around the First Nations Indigenous Women’s Statement, developed during the First Nations Pre-Conference, and invite institutions, movements, and individuals to turn reflection into concrete action in solidarity with First Nations and Indigenous women around the world.

• Autonomy is Collective: Bodily Autonomy and Community Power

  April 28, 2:00 – 3:30 pm

  This session centers communities not as recipients of change, but as the people leading it. Grounded in struggles for sex work decriminalization, reproductive justice, and grassroots organizing, it makes the case that protecting autonomy requires collective responsibility across systems and sectors, and sustained, community-led action, rather than institutional goodwill alone.

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  Different systems continue to deny people control over their own bodies, often using the language of safety, productivity, population control, or respectability. Bodily autonomy — including sexual and reproductive health and rights — cannot be defended in isolation from the wider political and social forces that seek to regulate whose bodies matter, whose choices count, and whose freedom is negotiable.

  This session will also name uncomfortable truths within feminist spaces, where selective solidarity, silence, or opposition have at times reinforced the exclusion of some communities.

• Shaping a New World Order: People-Driven Multilateralism

  April 28, 4:00 – 5:30 pm

  Today’s multilateral system is marked by deep contradictions. It continues to matter, yet too often fails to meet the urgency, inequality, and political realities of this moment.

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  This session names those failures, reclaiming moments when civil society helped push multilateralism forward, and asks what more people-driven models rooted in accountability, pluralism, and shared responsibility would require.

  In doing so, it puts a wider challenge to governments, institutions, funders, and civil society alike: how to rebuild multilateralism not as an abstract system, but as a shared political project grounded in justice, participation, and humanity.

• Girls at the Center: Power, Voice, and Investment

  April 29, 9:30 – 11:00 am

  This plenary will call for global political and financial commitments to adolescent girls, while making clear that girls’ leadership is central to shaping a just future.

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  Adolescent girls are not one group with one set of needs. They are diverse, and their needs can only be met when all girls have real power in the systems that shape decisions and control resources. Adolescence is a pivotal period: it is when opportunities can expand, but also when exclusion, violence, and unequal expectations can become more deeply entrenched. How systems respond at this stage shapes not only girls’ lives, but the future of communities and societies more broadly.

  This plenary calls on policymakers, funders, institutions, and movement leaders to move beyond superficial inclusion toward shared power, real accountability, and sustained investment. In doing so, it makes clear that a serious commitment to adolescent girls is not only about visibility or representation, but about whether our political, social, and economic systems are willing to change in ways that deliver justice.

• Resourcing Feminist Futures: Power, Politics, and the Future of Funding

  April 29, 11:30 am – 1:00 pm

  This session invites movements, funders, governments, and allies to see themselves as active participants in building the funding infrastructure feminist work needs now and into the future.

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  Funding for feminist work is entering a new reality, shaped by shrinking resources, political and economic shifts, and deepening global inequality. Meeting this moment will require those who control resources to recognize the importance of feminist movements, make serious long-term commitments, and rethink not only how much they fund, but the terms on which that funding is provided.

  This session will spotlight collaborative models that are already responding and reshaping how feminist movements are funded across regions and sectors.

• Beyond Resilience: Climate Justice on the Road to COP31

  April 29, 2:00 – 3:30 pm

  This session asks how the international climate agenda can better respond to the realities facing women and communities living on the frontlines of climate change.

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  Climate change is driving displacement, increasing care burdens, and deepening the risks of gender-based violence and economic exclusion. At the same time, women and Indigenous leaders are on the frontlines of climate action — protecting land and oceans, designing community-based responses, and pushing for climate justice on the global stage.

  Holding the Women Deliver 2026 Conference in Australia, as the global climate agenda builds toward COP31, creates an important moment to connect gender equality and climate action more directly.

  This plenary will focus on three urgent areas: strengthening community resilience, advancing meaningful support for loss and damage, and ensuring that gender action plans are carried out in global climate decision-making.

• Building Economies that Deliver: Care, Public Services, and Shared Prosperity

  April 29, 4:00 – 5:30 pm

  This plenary will highlight practical approaches that strengthen the systems people rely on and expand economic agency

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  Across regions, governments prioritize military spending, debt repayments, and the interests of the ultra-wealthy over long-term investment in public services and social systems. As funding for health, education, and community support disappears, girls and women disproportionately carry the burden of care work, limiting their ability to take part in education, paid work, and public life.

  These are not inevitable outcomes, but the result of political and economic choices about whose well-being is valued, what gets funded, and which systems are allowed to fail.

  This session looks at what it would take to make different choices. It highlights practical approaches that strengthen the systems people rely on and expand economic agency, reframes care and public services as core parts of a healthy economy, identifies actionable fiscal tools governments can use, and shares examples of regenerative economic models already in practice.

• Redefining Roles: States, Civil Society, and Global Actors

  April 30, 9:30 – 11:00 am

  A more just international development model begins with a clear principle: states have obligations to the people who live within their borders to uphold human rights and deliver essential services.

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  Taking that seriously requires international organizations, including INGOs and multilateral institutions, to shift away from direct service delivery and instead focus on strengthening public systems, supporting locally defined priorities at the national and global level, and enabling strong, independent civil society to advocate and hold governments accountable.

  At stake is not only what the sector believes, but how it works in practice — where power sits, what international actors are there to do, and how responsibility is shared.

  This session focuses on what it would take to turn that vision into reality by clarifying roles, identifying strategies, and building cross-sector commitments rooted in accountability.

• Women Are Not Negotiable: Conflict, Power, and Accountability

  April 30, 11:30 am – 1:00 pm

  At a time of escalating conflict, shrinking humanitarian access, and open challenges to international norms, this plenary asks not only what is happening to women in conflict, but what political choices, power structures, and systemic failures have made this crisis possible.

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  This session calls for a shift from symbolic protection to shared power, from legal promises to enforceable accountability, and from extractive aid models to women-led peacebuilding and recovery.

  In doing so, it challenges governments, institutions, and humanitarian actors to reckon with whose lives are being treated as negotiable — and what it would take to respond differently.

• The Future Calls Us Here: Women Deliver 2026 Closing Ceremony

  April 30, 2:30 – 3:30 pm

  WD2026’s Closing Ceremony marks the end of the Conference, and the launch of the Declaration for the international development sector.

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  We will celebrate what we have built over four days together, while also marking the commitments that will carry this work forward.

  Through the music and dance of our Oceanic Pacific and First Nations hosts, we will reflect on what WD2026 has made possible, which ideas we will now take into action, and which conversations and responsibilities we will continue long after the Conference ends.