8.C. Workshop: Female leadership in times of crisis – fostering a sustainable future for humanity

Women in Global Health (WGH) is a global movement with the largest network of women and allies working to challenge power and privilege for gender equity in health. It has grown to include over 50,000 supporters in 90 countries and has 41 official chapters. The WGH European network is an established hub of the global WGH movement focusing on gender equality in Europe Some of the WGH European Chapters have been engaged in the work with Ukrainian migrants.The workshop will start with a brief introduction to the WGH network and European hub. Following these opening remarks, the session will review the ongoing conflict in Ukraine through a gender equity lens, exploring what the crisis has taught us and how these experiences can help improve gender equity interventions in the future. The session will focus on two topics. 1) exploring the daily realities of women living in the conflict situation in Ukraine and 2) the situation of Ukrainian female refugees in European Member States. We will hear personal stories and accounts from Ukrainian women themselves and from professionals working with them both in-country and in European Member States. The inputs will be moderated in an interview style by one of the WGH European Chapter leads. The interviews will be followed by an interactive section where discussions will be facilitated with the audience in small groups. These discussions will centre on the accounts heard in the session and draw on any personal experience audience members may have of working with women in/from conflict situations, in Ukraine or elsewhere. In the plenary, we will then ask the small for feedback on their conversations. with the aim of discussing what the WGH movement can learn from these experiences with respect to applying them to interventions in gender equity in migrant health in the future. A final input from a female health leader will reflect on the session content and summarise its conclusions. KEY MESSAGES: • Gender equity can bring about transformative change in times of crisis. • Gender equity is not merely the ethical way to advance, but an operational necessity in time of crisis. SPEAKERS/PANELISTS: Sabine Ludwig Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany Halyna Skipalska Ukrainian Foundation for Public Health, Kyiv, Ukraine Paloma Cuchi WHO, Poland