Foreign Policy Blogs

Delivering solutions for girls and women

Tomorrow marks the opening of Women Deliver 2010, the largest conference on women and maternal health, held June 7-9 in Washington, DC.  Speakers will include UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, Christiane Amanpour, Helene Gayle, and Melinda Gates, among others.  The 2007 conference brought together more than 2000 participants from 115 countries, and brought emphasis to the importance of maternal health in achieving the Millennium Development Goals.  Live webcasts are available; the Lancet has also released a themed issue in honor of the event.

 

Author

Cynthia Schweer Rayner

Cynthia Schweer Rayner is an independent consultant and philanthropy advisor specializing in public health, social entrepreneurship and scalable business models for positive social change. As a recovering management consultant, she spent several months living in South Africa, and later co-founded the US branch of an organization providing support to orphaned and vulnerable children. In 2009, she was an LGT Venture Philanthropy Fellow, working with mothers2mothers (m2m), a multinational non-profit organization employing mothers living with HIV as peer educators to positive pregnant women. She currently works with individuals, companies and nonprofits to finance and develop models for positive change. Cynthia has an MBA from INSEAD and a BA in English Literature from Georgetown University. She currently lives in Cape Town and visits New York frequently, where she co-owns a Manhattan-based yoga studio, mang'Oh yoga (www.mangohstudio.com).