Change calls us to Women Deliver 2026!

Women Deliver 2026 was held from 27 to 30 April in Narrm (Melbourne), on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation.

On the opening day, I watched a performance that stopped me completely. Indigenous women of the Kulin Nations danced together, openly and joyfully, on their own Country. What struck me was how that joy felt like an act of resistance. Indigenous culture and knowledge, rooted and irreplaceable, are still fighting to survive in Narrm and far beyond it. 

What does it actually mean to gather in solidarity, on land that was never ceded, and call for a more equal world? I do not think there is a clean answer. But I think it matters that we keep asking it.

Gender inequality looks different across contexts, yet the barriers remain familiar: exclusion from decision-making, underfunding, and the dismissal of women’s leadership and knowledge. Whether in Ukraine, Bangladesh, or Southeast Asia, many are confronting the same structural resistance. There is something both sobering and clarifying about being in a room of people and recognising that.

It was the first time the conference had been regionally hosted by the Oceanic Pacific, and around 6,500 participants from 189 countries came together: advocates, grassroots organisers, policymakers, and youth leaders. Wedu was there for the formal launch of a new feminist learning partnership, delivered in partnership with Global Affairs Canada (GAC) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and to bring the Climate Alliance for Women Leaders in Asia (CAWLA) into a room that needed to hear from us.

Grounding the work: Women’s Voice and Leadership Learning Partnership Inception Workshop

The day before the conference opened, Wedu joined the Women’s Voice and Leadership Learning Partnership Inception Workshop, a full day bringing together representatives from the Global Learning Hub, four Regional Learning Hubs, GAC, and IDRC.

The Learning Partnership runs from 2026 to 2029 and accompanies 21 women’s rights organisations across multiple regions through peer learning, evidence gathering, and organisational strengthening. Wedu leads the Regional Learning Hub for Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe, working with partners in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Ukraine. Our role is to consolidate learning from what these organisations are doing on the ground and connect it to the knowledge being generated across all regional hubs.

The inception workshop was where that work formally began. It gave us a first look into a rich body of knowledge from the first phase, clarity on what comes next, and real connections with peers from other regions. The principles that will guide how we all work together were clear from the start: non-extractive, respectful of diversity, and genuinely collaborative. For Wedu, that is both a commitment and an opportunity.

CAWLA takes the stage

On Tuesday morning, Wedu presented CAWLA’s positioning statement at Open Ground, an event curated by the Australian International Development Network. The audience included DFAT representatives, philanthropists, and feminist civil society leaders. Our posters were displayed in the Women Deliver Climate Hub and Gender Pavilion throughout the conference, sparking conversations with delegates from across the globe who stopped to read, photograph, and engage with CAWLA’s call to action.

CAWLA is Wedu’s regional platform connecting women climate leaders, investor networks, NGOs, social enterprises, and research institutes across South and Southeast Asia. Co-developed by its founding members, the platform’s position statement argues that women leaders in the region are architects of climate resilience, not an afterthought to it. 

The response confirmed what we had hoped. The framing resonated. Several conversations opened that we will now follow up on, including potential connections to the COP31 agenda 2026, with Australia taking on the Presidency of the COP negotiations and co-hosting the pre-COP leaders’ event alongside Pacific partners. 

Later in the week, we signed the Melbourne Declaration for Gender Equality on behalf of CAWLA, while also raising a concern worth naming: declarations without accountability mechanisms risk remaining aspirational. What would make this one different is an explicit commitment to principles, including gender-responsive approaches and power analysis, that ensure funding and accountability reach the furthest behind. We made that point in the room. We will keep making it.

Listening at Women Deliver

Across four days, a few themes kept surfacing in formal sessions and corridor conversations alike.

The funding crisis is here, and movements know it.

The median annual budget of a feminist organisation has not changed since 2010, remaining at around USD 22,000. Climate financing compounds this: only a small share of climate-related blended finance deals are gender-responsive, and the gap between where money flows and where women are leading climate action remains wide. One statistic stayed with me from one of the conference sessions: the three largest anti-rights organisations had a combined income of USD 532 million in 2023, roughly twice the total funding of 1,200 feminist organisations surveyed¹. Nearly half of those feminist organisations faced the risk of closure, and almost two-thirds said they could not continue operating for six months if funding stopped. The most useful framing I heard was this: we are not in a post-ODA (Official Development Assistance)²  world, but in a moment of transition. Defend and reform ODA, push for stricter gender markers that actually reach local women’s rights organisations, and insist on feminist voices when new instruments, such as gender bonds, are designed.

Intersectionality as practice, not principle.

A thread we kept returning to was the gap between intersectionality as a stated commitment and intersectionality in practice. The session on Indigenous Women, Climate Justice, and Equitable Financing, hosted by the Samdhana Institute and partners, was a reminder of how easily grassroots and Indigenous organisations are structurally excluded from funding and policy spaces: compliance requirements designed for large organisations, reporting burdens that absorb implementation capacity, and volunteer reliance without sustainable structures. This matters directly for CAWLA. As the network grows, we need to be deliberate about whose voices are included in agenda-setting, whose knowledge counts, and what it actually costs for organisations with fewer resources to participate meaningfully.

Care is structural, not soft.

Women perform the vast majority of unpaid care work globally, and in climate-affected communities, that burden intensifies precisely when systems fail. Climate resilience that does not account for care infrastructure is not resilience. Financing that does not reach women doing care work in climate-affected communities is not gender-responsive financing. This belongs at the centre of what CAWLA advocates for. 

Stronger Together: Why Alliances Are the Strategy

I left Narrm with something I did not expect: a feeling of being held. Not just inspired, but genuinely held by the sense that the work Wedu and CAWLA are doing is part of a larger movement, shaped by thousands of people asking the same questions and choosing to push against the same walls together.

I sat in rooms where women leaders from conflict zones, Indigenous communities, and grassroots organisations across the Pacific described strategies that mirror what CAWLA members are building in Southeast Asia. Different contexts, same determination. The climate and gender nexus is global, and the women navigating it are not waiting for systems to catch up.

Women’s leadership is not just a moral argument. It is a proven pathway to more effective, more durable climate outcomes. I left more convinced than ever in the work Wedu is doing: supporting 5,000 women leaders across South and Southeast Asia to build resilience and lead on their own terms.

The organisations advancing that work are stronger when we know each other, learn from each other, and show up for each other. Collective effort is not a nice-to-have. It is the strategy. And this moment, as old systems crack and new ones are being built, is exactly when alliances matter most.

This reflection piece was written by Linh Nguyen, Wedu’s Regional Leadership Programme Manager

Footnotes:

¹ Data used in this article was taken from presentations by speakers in the conference sessions at Women Deliver 2026. 

²  Official Development Assistance (ODA) refers to government aid flows from wealthy countries to lower-income countries, administered through bodies such as USAID, DFAT, the European Union, and Global Affairs Canada. In recent years, several major donors have significantly reduced their ODA budgets, with direct consequences for women’s rights organisations and feminist movements globally.