Anthropologist Margaret Mead famously said “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”  In mid-June, a new network of thoughtful, committed, and powerful women from around the world—a queen, a president, two Nobel Peace Laureates, seven First Ladies, numerous cabinet members of governments from around the world, high-level officials from a variety of United Nations agencies, nonprofit, business, faith, educational, philanthropic, and cultural leaders, and young leaders across race and faith—gathered together to act to build a world safe and fit for children.  

This unprecedented meeting of prominent women leaders who gathered at the Dead Sea Conference Center under the patronage of Her Majesty Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan to launch the Global Women's Action Network for Children share Eleanor Roosevelt’s belief that “only women in power” will “consider the needs of women without power” and that “a woman’s will is the strongest thing in the world.”  The Jordan conference seeks to catalyze the powerful will of powerful women on behalf of the suffering, dying, and illiterate powerless women and children around the world.

Although the needs of women and children are inextricably intertwined, advocates for women’s rights and for children’s rights have too often operated separately.  We came from near and far to Jordan to bundle our voices, talents, resources, and wills together in passionate, persistent, and irresistible advocacy that will not take “no,” “maybe,” or “later” for an answer to the urgent cries of mothers and motherless children dying this hour, minute, and second today and every day.

The Global Women’s Action Network for Children has selected two goals for focused and long-term advocacy and action: reducing maternal, newborn, and child mortality and improving maternal and child health, and improving girls’ access to education. It is morally intolerable that 11 million mothers and children up to age five die every year around the world largely invisibly, three-fourths from preventable causes, and that 100 million children, a majority girls, are denied education.  This annual holocaust is twice the population of Jordan. Both of our goals are included in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by the United Nations, targeted to be achieved by 2015.  At the current rate of progress, the majority of nations won’t meet that deadline.  But this groundbreaking network of multi-national, multi-generational, multi-racial, multi-faith, multi-sector women has pledged to help change that outcome.

The Global Women’s Action Network for Children will be an ongoing advocacy coalition housed at the Children’s Defense Fund, which began quietly convening women leaders from around the nation and globe over five years ago in our effort to strengthen women’s voices to build a world fit for children.  CDF co-convened the Jordan gathering with four powerful women leaders:  former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; former President of Ireland and United Nations Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson; Melanne Verveer, CEO of Vital Voices; and Mahnaz Afkhami, Founder and President of the Women’s Learning Partnership. We partnered with the National Council of Family Affairs in Jordan chaired by Her Majesty Queen Rania Al-Abdullah.

At the end of the Jordan conference, the 200 women were united in our commitment, drive, and willingness to use our power and resources to save the lives of mothers and children and invest in the potential of all of our children. We want to make clear that these life and death issues are a top women’s concern, and to unite the voices of women leaders for women, women leaders for children, and women leaders for youth into a cohesive whole bigger than our parts and to make government and private sector leaders and policy and decision makers around the world hear us and act.  We want this conference to spark a bold, aggressive, focused, and combined advocacy voice that will carry the morally obscene and unnecessary suffering and illiteracy of powerless mothers and children into the halls of power, and keep them there until they become visible and urgent global imperatives that must be acted on. The conference confirmed for us the hope we can bring, the dreams we can salvage, the knowledge we can share, the successful policies and practices we can scale up, the power we can multiply, and the strong wills we can build by uniting our demands for justice for the voiceless through collaborative action steps and a strategic, long term action plan.

In this time of unbearable dissonance between promise and performance, between good politics and good policy, between professed and practiced human and family values, between racial and religious creed and racial and religious deed, between calls for community and rampant individualism and greed, and between our capacity to prevent and alleviate human deprivation and disease and our political and spiritual will to do so, I believe our children and their mothers women and all those with a mothering spirit can become the healing agents of our national and world transformation. Every prophet, president, king, queen, leader and human being of every place, color, gender, and faith entered life as a baby. The child is the present and the future and our Creator's universal messenger of hope and immortality. What will it take for the world to get it?  It will take strong, determined women to get the world to get it at a time when millions of child lives are being ravaged by the wars, neglect, abuse, racial, ethnic, religious, and class divisions of adults. Protecting today's children tomorrow's leaders and parents and their mothers and families is the moral and common sense litmus test of our humanity, and the overarching purpose of the Global Action Women’s Network for Children and its coalition of women committed to change.