'I'm hoping we get that feeling of forward momentum back': Dr. Maliha Khan, Women Deliver CEO

Following a three-year hiatus brought on by the COVID pandemic, the Women Deliver Conference (WD2023), one of the world's most important gatherings for gender equality and women's rights and health issues, especially sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), will be held this year in Kigali, Rwanda between July 17-20.

The conference, which is being held for the first time on the African continent, is expected to convene some 6,000 people in Kigali and more than 200,000 online under the theme of spaces, solidarity, and solutions.

Ahead of WD2023, Exemplars News spoke with Women Deliver President and CEO, Dr. Maliha Khan, about how the organization is contributing to SRHR and countering anti-SRHR movements, and the importance of political will in moving gender equality and SRHR issues forward.

How does Women Deliver contribute to promoting and ensuring SRHR for women and girls worldwide?

Dr. Khan: I think Women Deliver is one of the institutions that defines and creates and helps occupy global spaces. Not enough attention has been paid to the evolving nature of global spaces. I think previously global spaces were primarily occupied by either multilateral institutions and organizations which run in their own rhythm and have their own strengths and weaknesses or are very Northern-based institutions.

I think recent movements, particularly the Black Lives Matters movement, have led to a whole decolonizing of the international development space. There's a need to really think about global spaces that are, first, beyond the multilaterals, and second, much more inclusive of the issues and agendas we need to occupy. That is one of the things I think we do.

The upcoming Women Deliver Conference is our biggest example of that space where we're trying to change who leads change, who is featured, and who sets the agenda. But at the same time, make it an event that everyone – from big multilateral organizations to small grassroots organizations – feels that they can come to. That it's their space and they can have those conversations.

I think that's very necessary because global spaces give us two things. They give us inspirational and aspirational agendas. You can look at the Beijing Agenda. You can look at the ICPD [in Cairo]. They weren't reasonable agendas then. They were aspirational. The world had to live up to them.

The multilateral spaces can't really do that anymore because they've been too occupied by the anti-rights movement, and they're completely bogged down with discussing definitions of words rather than actually making progress on any of these issues. We definitely need to focus on progress [at these forums]. We need to make them truly global and inclusive. We need to give equal voice across all the different actors, and that's hard because there's huge power differentials. That is, I think, the thing that Women Deliver tries to do. When we go to COP or we have events at the sidelines of the UN General Assembly or other spaces like that, we try to bring in the voices of actors who don't often have access to those spaces.

We're also not afraid to talk about issues that people often hesitate to talk about, including pushing for the full suite of sexual reproductive health and rights. Particularly given the toxic rhetoric around abortion – which is essential health care – in some contexts, it's important that you have a few voices who are free to be able to stand up for equitable access to abortion care.

Young people often face unique challenges and resistance in accessing SRHR information and services. Could you share some of the initiatives Women Deliver has undertaken to engage and support young people in advocating for their SRHR rights?

Dr. Khan: Our flagship program, the Young Leaders Program, has been around for 10 years. We've been focusing on youth and the issues of youth and treating them as a separate and legitimate demographic for well over a decade. We've always had a very strong youth focus recognizing, firstly, that youth have different issues and approaches and we need different solutions for their needs, but also that they are leaders in their own right and should have a legitimate say in things that are going to affect them individually for a much longer period of time than for some of us who are no longer so young.

Sexual reproductive health and rights or the nexus between SRHR and the climate crisis and so on, these are issues that are primarily going to affect those who are under 30 for a very long time. They should definitely not only have a say in them but have a seat at the decision-making table and often they do not. And now that we've started to actually contemplate youths a little bit, the seat at the table they're given is often quite tokenistic. We really have to start moving beyond meaningful engagement, which is what a lot of people talk about, to actually just giving youth the leadership they deserve without any caveats and conditions.

The other thing I'll say is that we also need to really hone in on what we mean by youths. We tend to think of people under 30. We tend to take them as an undifferentiated whole. We also tend to say "OK, tick. We've checked the youth box when we've organized a panel or consultation and we've got two people under 30 without looking at them really critically and asking "Who are they?" I think the difference between, say, an educated, elite 29-year-old male sitting in a capital city is very different from an adolescent girl sitting in a rural area or some marginalized peri-urban area who's really trying to navigate the big decisions in her life.

One of the things that we're doing at Women Deliver is really getting down to who we mean by youth and having a real focus on adolescent girls from now on. Firstly, by making sure we consult with adolescent girls and give them a chair at the table. But also by supporting initiatives that focus on their particular issues and needs. Otherwise, we are about to fail a whole new generation of adolescent girls in a very, very bad way, and that's something we have to be very aware of.

The theme of this year’s Women Deliver Conference is spaces, solidarity, and solutions. Could you tell us why these were chosen?

Dr. Khan: We already discussed spaces – Women Deliver is one of those spaces that the world needs on gender equality. On solidarity, I think one obvious answer is we've all just been through three years of COVID. We've all been through three years of sitting on Zoom, not meeting people in real life. Slowly over the past six or eight months, things have picked up and a few convenings have happened, but people are hungry for more convenings. People are hungry to see each other, meet each other in real life, and establish those bonds of trust.

Going beyond just that very obvious need for solidarity, I actually think that the feminist movement has given into a lot of rifts recently, including an exclusionary movement, such as wrongly excluding trans or gender-nonconforming people. We've got such big issues to worry about and those types of things are tearing us apart. To me at least, they are very intentional tactics that are being fostered by the anti-rights movement, by those who are opposing rights and particularly the bodily autonomy of girls and women.

On the solutions, I will say people often hear the word solutions and think of a technical solution. We have so many technical solutions. There's pretty much no issue out there that we don't know the technical solution for. What's missing is the political will, the galvanization of movement and pressure around it, and frankly, the emotive push to get things done. When you combine a technical solution with political will and an emotional upswell of a bigger base, you really start to see massive change happen. It can happen very quickly.

The anti-SRHR movement frequently opposes access to safe and legal abortion services, leading to significant risks for women's health and well-being. How can we leverage evidence to challenge the stigmatization of abortion and advocate for policies that safeguard women's reproductive rights?

Dr. Khan: It's not more scientific evidence with a capital E that we need. I think there's 40 or 50 years of deep medical evidence around the complete suite of sexual reproductive health and rights – including on the role of contraceptives, the role of comprehensive sexuality education, and the role of availability of abortion – that is irrefutable. What we need to do is really galvanize that political will.

We know that even in the United States, where abortion has become such a hot-button topic, that poll after poll shows the vast majority of the public actually supports a woman's right to abortion, a woman's right to complete sexuality, SRHR, and so on. Even in the United States, we've seen cases where, in some red states, they were able to galvanize political will and they were able to pass laws (in support of abortion) or get people elected (who supported abortion), because people realize that enough is enough and we've really got to support what we believe in.

You also see examples of this in many other places too. One of the examples I love is Ireland and what happened in that country around the support for gay marriage, which is closely related to this, right? It's all about gender ideology and bodily autonomy and integrity. Who thought Ireland would have a referendum and come out so overwhelmingly in support of (abortion) given their previous history? Again, it's not evidence. It is how we use the existing evidence to drive political support that counters the anti-gender, anti-rights ideology that's out there.

What are you personally hoping will be achieved at this year’s Women Deliver conference?

Dr. Khan: I hope that we've been able to create a space that is inclusive. That is global. That people feel like, OK, this is a moment for gender equality champions and feminist movement. It's been a long time since we've been able to get together and to feel that energy, that solidarity, and that push to go forward.

I also hope what comes out of it is a feeling of solidarity. The feeling that we're not in it alone. The last several years have been such an onslaught, with so many negative things happening. Not just COVID, but also the impact of the climate crisis. I'm from Pakistan and seeing one-third of my country, including my mother's ancestral village, literally under six feet of water, and seeing the impact of that on girls and women and poor people. It made you wonder – how will we move forward with this?

So, I'm hoping we get that feeling of forward momentum back, get back that feeling of solidarity and that we're in this together, and that together we can actually achieve a lot. As someone once said, we overestimate what we can achieve in one to two years, but underestimate what we can achieve in a decade or two. I think we need to remind ourselves that the last couple of years does not set our trajectory for the next decade. Let's rethink our trajectory for the next decade and actually act like we can achieve it.