The Women Who Build, Carry, and Transform Our World, A Reflection for International Women’s Day

Every year, International Women’s Day arrives with celebration, color, and powerful messages. Yet beyond the hashtags and the graphics, I often find myself returning to a quieter question: what does it truly mean to celebrate women?

For me, celebrating women goes beyond acknowledging achievements or leadership titles.

It is about recognizing the countless women who build systems, carry communities, and transform lives often without applause.

Working in the development sector has given me the privilege of encountering many of these women. Some sit in boardrooms shaping policies and programmes that influence thousands of lives. Others sit under trees in community meetings, discussing how to ensure their children can stay in school or how families can navigate the challenges around them. Some lead organisations and manage complex programmes across countries, while others lead households, savings groups, and community initiatives that quietly shift the trajectory of their communities. The contexts may be different, but the thread that connects them is the same: courage, commitment, and resilience.

Across the development and social impact space, I have worked alongside women whose leadership is expressed in many ways women who design programmes that reach thousands of children, women who lead teams in fragile and complex environments, women who mentor younger professionals so that the ladder they climbed does not disappear behind them, and women who continue to push systems toward greater equity and inclusion. These women are not merely participants in development; they are architects of change.

Yet some of the most powerful lessons I have learned about leadership have not come from strategy meetings or conference rooms. They have come from the communities where we work from classrooms, women’s savings groups, and conversations with mothers who are determined to ensure their children have opportunities they themselves never had.

Over time, one truth has become increasingly clear to me: much of development work rests on the shoulders of women whose names may never appear in reports, presentations, or global conversations.

These are the women who show up to community meetings after long days of farming or trading. The women who join savings groups not only to support their families but to support one another. The women who advocate for their daughters to remain in school even when tradition or circumstance pushes in the opposite direction. The women who volunteer their time to mobilise communities, encourage children, and strengthen local initiatives.

Many of them would never describe themselves as leaders. Yet in the truest sense of the word, that is exactly what they are. They carry families, communities and in many ways, they carry hope.

I remember sitting with women who had very little in terms of material resources, yet their clarity about what they wanted for their children was unwavering. They wanted education, safety, and opportunities their own generation never had and they were prepared to fight quietly for those things. Sometimes that fight looks like convincing a father to allow a daughter to return to school. While other times it means walking long distances to attend a community meeting. Sometimes it is also the discipline of contributing small savings each week to support other women during difficult times.
These actions may appear small, but they are often where transformation begins.

In the development sector, we frequently speak about systems, frameworks, and policies and these are essential. Yet real change often takes root because women, both within institutions and within communities, decide that the future must be different.

Today, on International Women’s Day, I celebrate all of them: the women leading programmes and organisations, the women shaping policies and influencing systems, the women mentoring the next generation of leaders, and the women in communities who, often quietly and without recognition, are building stronger futures for their children.

And as we celebrate them, I also think about the young girls watching us the daughters, students, and mentees who are forming their understanding of what leadership can look like. My hope is that they see in us a reminder that leadership does not exist in only one space. Sometimes it stands on global stages, and sometimes it sits in small community circles.

Both matter.
Both are powerful.
And both are shaping the future.

Today, we celebrate the women who build, the women who carry, and the women who transform our world.

Happy International Women’s Day.