The Power Of Inclusion
Madam Executive Director of UNFPA, Dr. Naoko Kita. Excellencies, distinguished leaders, partners, and friends, good evening, and a warm namaste. It is a profound honor to stand before you at the World Health Summit among leaders, thinkers, and change-makers, united by one shared conviction: women's health is not a side issue.
It is the cornerstone of humanity's progress, prosperity, and future. As an actor and a newly turned producer in the Indian film industry, I've built my career telling stories that can make people laugh, cry, and sometimes see the world differently. Today, as UNFPA India's Honorary Ambassador for Gender Equality, I want to tell a story that belongs to all of us, the story of women's health.
Because behind every statistic is a life, a mother, a daughter, a sister, a leader whose potential is lost because health systems have failed her. I was reminded of this so vividly at my confirmate event in Mumbai as UNFPA India's Honorary Ambassador, where I met young women, young girls from Beed, a district in Maharashtra. Their personal experiences shook me to my core.
These little girls were married off at the ages of eleven, twelve, thirteen, sometimes to men twice or even thrice their age. At fifteen, many of them had become mothers. Just imagine that. They endured, they endured immense suffering from abuse, discrimination, life-threatening health complications, and at the core of all of this, a complete loss of childhood.
Listening to them, I felt a deep sense of heartbreak, but also outrage. Outrage that in the twenty-first century, girls are still denied their basic rights. Outrage that their bodies and their futures are decided already by someone else.
But what inspired me most was not just their resilience, but their transformation. With the right support, access to healthcare, safe spaces, and very importantly, education, they were thriving. Their dignity restored, their voices strong, and their dreams alive.
But what struck me the most was how universal were their hopes. They wanted what every girl in every nation desires: to live safely, to decide freely, to dream boldly, and to contribute meaningfully. Their resilience mirrors the quiet revolutions happening across India, where child marriage has halved in the last two decades, with the most significance progress seen amongst the disadvantaged households.
That's great news, but the still numbers are high. These stories of courage, change, and possibility also echo across continents, from rural villages in Africa to refugee camps in the Middle East to underserved communities here in Europe. Women everywhere share these same aspirations and unfortunately face the same barriers.
I believe three key pillars are foundational to women's empowerment. First being inclusion. We often say, "Nothing about her without her." Yet too often, decisions about women's health are still made without women at the table.
Globally, women remain underrepresented in health research, in policy design, and in clinical trials. For too long, the default human body used to build medicine and health technologies has been, quite frankly, a man. And until the nineteen-nineties, women were routinely excluded from clinical trials, and drugs tested on men were prescribed to them without understanding the effects.
And this is not a small oversight. It is a systemic failure. As someone who has studied engineering, I see it like building technology without testing half the inputs.
I mean, the result is going to be unstable and destined to fail. The same is true for health systems. When women are excluded, solutions fail to reflect their needs, their bodies, or their realities.
Women are fifty percent more likely than men to be misdiagnosed after a heart attack. Even outside health sector, in something as basic as car safety, women are forty-seven percent more likely to be seriously injured and seventeen percent more likely to die in car crashes. Because for decades, crash test dummies were designed around the average man.
Female dummies were introduced much later and often tested only on the passenger seat. Pregnant women face even greater risks. Despite car crashes being the leading cause of fatal death from maternal trauma, sixty-two percent of third trimester pregnant women do not fit the standard seatbelt design.
Isn't that sad? I mean, this is a stark reminder that women's realities when they're excluded, even the most basic protections can fail. This brings me back to my point. Inclusion is not optional.
It is fundamental. Women are not passive beneficiaries of healthcare. They are co-creators of it. Hence, my second key pillar is investment.
As Mr. Jean would agree, let's talk about money, right? Investing in women's health is not only the right thing to do morally, it is the smart thing to do economically and socially. For every three hundred million dollars invested in women's health, we get a return of thirteen billion.
Billion. Every dollar invested generates at least nine dollars back. And in India alone, every dollar invested in maternal health and family planning could yield eight point forty dollars in benefits by twenty fifty by improved workforce participation, reduced healthcare costs, greater productivity. Now scale all of this globally.
That's not a statistic. It's an economic revolution waiting to happen. And yet, women's health remains chronically underfunded, undervalued, and under prioritized.
Think about what this means. Healthier women mean healthier children, healthier families, stronger families, more resilient communities, fewer mothers lost to preventable causes, girls completing their education, entering the workforce, contributing to innovations, and demonstrating leadership the world desperately needs. Investment in family planning and maternal healthcare alone could reduce maternal deaths by seventy-five percent.
That is lives saved. That is futures transformed and potentials unleashed. Every day, trillions flow through global markets, yet the most impactful investment of all gets neglected.
This isn't just economics, it's values in my opinion. Do we value women enough to put their health at the center, or do we keep treating it as secondary and something to, you know, address later? If you're serious about progress, women's health isn't charity.
It's infrastructure. It is the foundation everything else is built on. And it's time we invest like it. Invest in the third pillar.
That is innovation. We live in the era of extraordinary innovation, digital health, artificial intelligence, and new financing models. But innovation is only transformative when it's inclusive. In India, digital health initiatives have reached over a hundred million women in rural areas, a number larger than population of many countries.
Yet despite these advances, women remain largely absent from the teams and companies designing the technologies that affect their lives. Currently, only fifteen percent of health tech companies are founded or co-founded by women, and not because women lack ideas. They don't. Definitely they don't.
But because they they are too often denied access to capital, networks, and opportunities. Ladies and gentlemen, we're leaving brilliance on the table. And imagine if digital health tools were designed with rural women in mind, or if AI systems were trained on women's realities, if financing models channeled resources directly to women-led enterprises.
That's why initiatives like UNFPA X Collective Sorry. That's why initiatives like UNFPA X Women Collective are so important. They connect innovators, investors, and advocates to create ecosystems where women-focused solutions can scale, where women are not an afterthought but the starting point.
Excellencies and my friends, women make up for half of humanity. They are caregivers, entrepreneurs, innovators, leaders. To neglect their health is not only unjust, it is self-defeating.
India has had seventy-three percent reduction in maternal mortality since two thousand, which means one million more mothers are alive today, nurturing children and building communities. Now imagine if every nation did the same. The collective gains for health equality and global prosperity would be immense.
Imagine a world where every girl gets to make choices about her own body, where every woman, wherever she lives, has access to quality healthcare, where innovations are designed by women for women and with women, where investment in women's health is not optional but indispensable. And this is not just a dream. This is well within our reach.
But it requires courage, commitment, and action now. I am proud to stand with UNFPA, with all of you here at the World Health Summit, to make this vision a reality. Let us close this gap and reimagine global health through women.
Thank you.
