Vital Voices: Stories by Emerging Women Leaders from Around the Globe

Despite women’s increased participation over the past several decades in public leadership roles, they still hold a mere 21 percent of ministerial positions globally. Only three countries have 50 percent or more women in parliament, and only 22 countries are headed by women. Women in leadership positions face discriminatory norms, exclusionary policies, and a lack of access to finance that make it more challenging for them to achieve positions with higher levels of responsibility. Yet when women have seats at decision-making tables, they bring transformative changes to entire communities and the world at large. 

The Vital Voices Global Partnership invests in women leaders from 185 countries who are working hard to solve the world’s greatest challenges– from gender-based violence to the climate crisis, economic inequities, and more. In 2021, StoryCenter partnered with Vital Voices Engage, the organization’s signature fellowship program supporting outstanding women political leaders making and influencing policy across the globe. During the nine months of the Engage program, fellows were trained on leadership, strategic communication, political strategy, and good governance. We were brought in to help them create stories of the challenges they’ve faced as women leaders in male-dominated fields, and the factors that ignited their call to leadership. In four online workshops, we led 36 fellows through a six-week customized digital storytelling process. Participants included members of parliament from Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, India, and Hungary; numerous mayors, senators, and NGO founders and executive directors; a minister of the environment; a deputy minister of labor; a journalist for a major media outlet; and more.

The powerful stories that emerged from this series of workshops touch on a broad range of gender, health, family, and environmental issues, exposing the reality of what it’s like to occupy a position of leadership in contexts that consistently devalue women’s voices. Vital Voices has screened them internally for the entire cohort and is publicly sharing a subset of the stories whose creators have given permission, as examples of why its programs are so important, and how its fellows are deepening their commitment to gender justice. View some of the stories online here.