Envisioning a just world: Insights from the SAIS Women’s Leadership Summit

The Women’s Leadership Summit brought women and allies together and featured a keynote by President Vjosa Osmani of Kosovo

• Image Kaveh Sardari

Key Takeaways

• The SAIS Women’s Leadership Summit illuminated the need for gender equality. Kosovo’s President Vjosa Osmani argued women can excel in leadership roles when given the opportunity.
• Speakers explained why it’s important to integrate women’s perspectives in addressing global issues like climate justice and technology access, especially in developing nations.

The statistics Johns Hopkins PhD student Sandrine Mugenga Irankunda shared at the university’s recent Women’s Leadership Summit were sobering:

• One in three women globally have experienced physical or sexual violence.
• Nearly three-quarters of trafficking victims are women.
• Approximately 800 women die from pregnancy-related complications every day.

Mugenga Irankunda urged the audience to “reject them loudly” and work toward a better future. The summit gathered an array of voices, including as Kosovo’s President Vjosa Osmani, to explore the urgent theme of “envisioning a just world” across sectors.

Chiedo Nwankwor, vice dean of John Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and director of SAIS Women Lead, began the event with a powerful message: “Despite the bleakness of today’s scorecard, we must not relent. We must continue to fight to hope and to envision a future that is truly just, because the alternative is unthinkable.”

Osmani: Resilience and women’s empowerment

Osmani, who was elected Kosovo’s president in 2021, shared her experience as a woman in politics and offered a powerful vision of a more equitable future. Her life story, from growing up in a war-torn nation to a career as a politician leading to the Kosovo’s presidency, highlights the value of resilience. However, her success has not come without struggles.

“I have navigated spaces resistant to equality between men and women. I witnessed this in political parties, in the halls where we crafted strategies and documents setting the foundation of our statehood, and even within social circles,” Osmani said. “In many minds, a woman could perform adequately, but never quite as well as men.”

Osmani insisted that women excel when they are given equal opportunities, pointing to her experiences as proof. During her time in parliament, she said, she and her peers would review statistics that showed which members of parliament raised issues that dealt with the most acute problems of the citizens, including issues related to education, health, and children. She recalls them being women.

“It never ended up as a headline in the media because it was not exciting enough,” Osmani said. “It was not clickbait, but it was the women that statistically raised the issues that truly mattered to the citizens. But then men would pick a fistfight, and that was the top news.”

Building a better world for women through technology

Other speakers explored the risks and benefits that accompany new technologies. Advances such as AI bring opportunities to improve women’s lives, providing a way for women to access labor markets, finance, and more. But, speakers warned, these technologies have to be used correctly for women to reap the benefits.

Stefania Fabrizio, unit chief of the gender and inclusion unit at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), said that AI can complement human work. She cited a recent IMF study that found women’s strong presence in the service sector has given them greater exposure to AI and opportunities to profit from it, compared to men.

Wendy Teleki, head of the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi) Secretariat at the World Bank Group, added that women must not just have access to a phone or internet, but have control over it, rather than borrowing it from their husband or son. Teleki added that new technology could help to close the fundraising gap between companies owned by men and women.

A just transition

Luam Kidane, director of gender, race, and power at Open Society Foundation, emphasized that we are seeing an increase of climate disasters across the globe, but the climate crisis is not gender neutral. Caren Grown, a senior fellow at the Center for Sustainable Development at Brookings, demonstrated this divide with what she calls the “care economy.”

“So think about New Delhi, or any place where there was a heat wave that caused schools to close. What happens when schools close? Kids have to go home. So if you’re not a wealthy woman employing people to help in your household, you will leave your job and you will take care of your kids. It’s highly unlikely that men will do that. It’s the women who do that,” Grown said. “When we have climate change that increases all kinds of airborne diseases like dengue and malaria, who is the unpaid caregiver who takes care of ill and sick people? When we have floods, who really has to think through how you’re going to scrounge for food and other things>”

Grown conducted a survey to see how many cities think about care while preparing for disasters, and almost none did. She explained that a productive economy depends on care, so there must be a structural transformation.

Her findings underscored Osmani’s message that no matter the issue, women must be involved in the discussions.

“There can be no long-lasting peace without women at the table,” Osmani said. “No guaranteed long-term security without women engaged. Nothing can truly be done for women, without women being part of it themselves.”