Healthy Women, Healthy Economies is a global initiative that aims to unleash the “economic power of women by bringing governments, private sector, and other civil sector actors together to improve women’s health,” says Jocelyn Ulrich of EMD Serono (known as Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany outside of the US and Canada) in our Friday Podcast. Providing for women’s health needs enables them to “join, thrive, and rise” in the economy, “bringing prosperity home to their families and communities.”

According to a raft of experts, empowering women to be economic actors would change quite a bit. The UN Secretary General set up a High-Level Panel on it; Melinda Gates keeps talking about it; and the World Bank and Ivanka Trump recently launched an initiative to unlock billions in financing for it. Targets related to women’s economic empowerment cut across multiple Sustainable Development Goals, including advancing equal rights to economic resources, doubling the agricultural productivity and incomes of women who are small-scale farmers, and achieving full and productive employment and decent work for all women.

In 1971, the wives of textile workers in Ahmedabad, western India, became the main earners in their families overnight, after several large textile mills closed down. They were part of the 94 percent of India’s female labor force working in the informal sector—recycling waste, embroidering fabric, and selling vegetables—and thus they remained largely invisible to the government and to formal labor unions. In response, Ela Bhatt, a young lawyer, met with 100 of the women in a public park to establish the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), which would later register as a trade union and swell to the two million members it boasts today.

“This is a woman who did exactly what she was supposed to do; she did exactly what we encourage pregnant women to do,” said Amy Dempsey of the Population Council at a recent Wilson Center event on World Preeclampsia Day. The Ethiopian woman was suffering from preeclampsia—a preventable condition—but like many pregnant women in low- and middle-income countries, she did not receive the treatment needed to stop it. “Pregnancy was the first time she had ever stepped foot in a health facility,” said Dempsey.