For global leaders, equity is often discussed as an aspiration. In India, we have learnt, sometimes painfully, that equity is something far more exacting. It is a delivery problem.
It is measured not by declarations made on global stages, but by whether a woman reaches care in time, whether a frontline worker has the tools and authority to act, whether a referral works at two in the morning, and whether dignity is embedded in systems rather than appended after failure. Equity succeeds or fails at the point of execution.
This conviction is central to the Alliance for Global Good: Gender Equity and Equality, launched at Davos in 2024. The Alliance was created to close a persistent gap in global development efforts: the distance between intent and outcomes. Across health, education, and enterprise, its mandate is simple: convert proven ideas into scalable, investable models that travel across borders.
Within a year, that mandate translated into action. At Davos 2025, partnerships were formed with the Commonwealth Secretariat to expand women’s entrepreneurship and sustainable economic opportunity, and with the US–India Strategic Partnership Forum to create pathways for women’s leadership in traditional energy sectors.
Nowhere is the importance of this approach clearer than in India’s maternal health journey—one that carries lessons far beyond our borders. When India’s Maternal Mortality Ratio declined from 130 (2014–16) to 88 (2020–22), this was not simply statistical progress. It was evidence of systems beginning to function with greater reliability: expanded institutional deliveries, higher coverage of skilled birth attendance, and growing trust between families and the health system, as reflected in NFHS-5 data.
But progress raises the bar.
Once scale is achieved, quality becomes the true test—consistency across geographies, the strength of last-mile clinics, the speed of emergency obstetric response, the resilience of blood supply and transport systems under pressure. As I emphasised elsewhere, the last mile is only as strong as the last clinic.
This is why women’s health cannot be treated as a narrow sectoral issue, confined to pregnancy and childbirth. Maternal outcomes are shaped long before labour—by nutrition, anaemia, adolescent health, mental well-being, awareness, timely antenatal care, and continuity after birth. Women’s lives do not occur in silos, and neither should our systems. The same continuum that defines women’s health also defines their economic participation.
Over the past year, one of the most important shifts I have observed is the growing recognition that women’s health is not a “social sector” expenditure. It is a national productivity imperative. Healthy women anchor resilient families, stable workforces, and stronger economies. Weak systems, by contrast, extract invisible costs for decades—through lost wages, disrupted education, preventable illness, and intergenerational disadvantage.
This is where multistakeholder platforms must earn their relevance. The Women’s Collective Forum was designed to do precisely that: move the conversation from sentiment to structure, and from structure to results. By convening parliamentarians, health leaders, researchers, and industry, the Forum has focused on women’s and child health priorities in a manner that is policy-ready and implementation-driven. In late 2025, it convened the Advancing Public Health Outcomes Forum on disease control and immunisation, releasing four flagship public health reports in collaboration with ICMR institutions and IIT Kharagpur’s Centre of Excellence in Affordable Healthcare.
These reports are not endpoints. They are instruments of accountability. In India, we have learnt that ideas become impact only when budgets align with priorities, procurement supports outcomes, human resources are trained and retained, and measurement is honest. A report that gathers dust is not knowledge—it is performance.
If health is one axis of equity, technology is the other—and their intersection will define the next decade. Gender equity will not survive the AI era on goodwill alone. Algorithms will increasingly determine who is hired, who accesses credit, who receives skilling opportunities, who is visible to health systems, and who is misinterpreted by them. Responsible innovation must therefore become non-negotiable.
This is where India’s evolving role in the global system matters. We are no longer only a site where development is implemented; we are increasingly a place where solutions are built at population scale. Our experience with digital public infrastructure, large-scale service delivery, and last-mile governance offers a transferable principle: design for scale, measure for equity, and refine continuously.
The Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR) India exemplifies this approach. A 2025 WEF publication notes that since its launch in 2018, C4IR India has directly impacted 1.25 million citizens through initiatives spanning AI-enabled agriculture, healthcare access, and urban development. The significance lies not only in the number, but in the method: policy shaped by real-world pilots, and pilots designed to scale responsibly.
At a time when technology often outpaces regulation and ethics, India’s experience demonstrates that it is possible to move fast without breaking trust—if guardrails are built early, stakeholders are engaged honestly, and citizens are treated as partners rather than endpoints.
As we approach Davos 2026, the message I bring is not one of triumphalism, but of disciplined optimism. India’s maternal health gains show what is possible when the state, the workforce, and communities align around a shared purpose. They also remind us that national averages can conceal deep inequality, and that the last mile will always be the most expensive—and the most important.
The Alliance and the Forum reflect a belief that global platforms must graduate from conversation to consequence. C4IR India reinforces a deeper truth: the future will be governed either by intentional design or by accidental bias.
Davos has never lacked for participation. The challenge is durability. Can we build mechanisms that outlast the moment—linking capital to outcomes, innovation to safeguards, and ambition to human dignity?
If India has a contribution to make to this global conversation, it is this: equity is not a virtue to be admired. It is an operating system to be built. And the only credible measure of our seriousness will be whether the last woman, in the last village, experiences progress not as a promise—but as a lived reality.
Views are personal. The author is Young Global Leader, World Economic Forum, and Founder and Chairperson of the Alliance for Global Good: Gender Equity and Equality, CII.
