Why we’re watching: Women Deliver’s conference, held every three years, has been a key moment in the global development calendar for over a decade. With the resignation of former CEO Katja Iversen over discrimination allegations in 2020, and the next Women Deliver conference slated for 2023 in Kigali, Rwanda, this year is make-or-break for the organization.

Leadership: Kathleen Sherwin, interim CEO.
Staff: 22.
Notable hire: Incoming board chair Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the former executive director of UN Women.
$: $2.5 million in revenue in 2020, down from $8 million in 2019.
HQ: New York.
Tidbit: In the wake of its 2020 leadership shuffle, the organization’s staff shrunk by around two-thirds.
Follow: Rumbi Chakamba and Sara Jerving.

Analysis: Global advocacy for women has become a more crowded field than when Women Deliver first launched in 2007. Most recently and notably, there’s the Generation Equality Forum, which aims to mobilize funding and policy changes. (It claims $40 billion was mobilized at last year’s event.) Then there’s the U.N.’s Commission on the Status of Women which has been meeting each year in New York for decades. Women Deliver’s convening was positioned as more grassroots and led by advocates, but its internal struggle with discrimination set the organization back. Now with a new board and soon to name a new permanent CEO, Women Deliver is on a path to remake itself in advance of its next conference, the first it will hold on the African continent. — RK.

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