WomenX Collective: Innovations For Women’s Health

Summary

In 2025, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) committed to launching the WomenX Collective (WomenX) to drive $100 million of investment to accelerate the adoption and scaling of women’s health innovations across low- and middle-income countries by 2027. By building investment-ready pipelines, testing scalable solutions, applying market intelligence to address market failures, and mobilizing blended finance, WomenX will de-risk investments in women’s health and work to close persistent gaps in women’s health access and outcomes. In its first phase, WomenX focuses on three critical health areas: maternal health, sexual and reproductive health, and reproductive cancers, aiming to directly prevent 2,100 maternal deaths, 1,040,000 unintended pregnancies, and 320,000 unsafe abortions — positively impacting over 5.1 million individuals in countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East and North Africa.

Approach

UNFPA commits to launching the WomenX Collective (WomenX) – a flagship global initiative accelerating the adoption and scaling of women’s health innovations across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) .
WomenX’s approach is uniquely designed to accelerate the scaling of advanced women’s health solutions and technologies in LMICs, combined with a strong focus on public learning and sharing. Building on UNFPA’s global presence across more than 150 countries and over 50 years of experience, WomenX leverages the organization’s purchasing power, local networks, and deep technical expertise in sexual and reproductive health. From inception, WomenX integrates innovative financing instruments and multi-sector partnerships that span the Global South and Global North institutions.
WomenX bridges women’s health inequities through its structured “Adopt–Assess–Scale via Financing” model. This model identifies promising innovations, assesses their readiness and impact, and mobilizes financing to support integration and scale-up within public health systems. By combining catalytic funding, blended finance models, and strategic partnerships, WomenX aims to accelerate access to life-saving diagnostics, treatments, and health care processes that would otherwise remain out of reach for underserved populations.
UNFPA contributes deep expertise in program design, implementation, monitoring, and scaling, as well as global convening power to align governments, donors, and private sector actors. WomenX also draws on UNFPA’s procurement and distribution infrastructure to ensure cost-effective delivery of health innovations.
UNFPA’s partners play critical roles across the commitment to align global stakeholders – academic, research, corporate, community and public sector institutions – in order to accelerate development and deployment of advanced solutions. Academic and research institutions provide technical validation, data, and innovation pipelines; private companies contribute cutting-edge technologies, manufacturing capacity, and market knowledge; governments enable integration within national health strategies; and local communities ensure solutions are culturally adapted and meet real-world needs. Together, these actors co-create sustainable pathways to scale, unlocking investment, improving health outcomes, and building resilient, women-centered health systems.

Action Plan

Q3 20205 – Phase I (funding) : At the start, UNFPA will complete a global scan of promising health innovations, prioritize target countries, and establish an expert advisory committee and national stakeholder forums to guide alignment with local systems, followed by baseline assessments in selected countries.
Q1 2026: Approximately six months after the start, UNFPA will launch and implement pilots using adaptive programming, allowing for continuous learning and refinement. Regular progress reviews will assess operational performance, identify barriers, and adjust strategies as needed.
Q1 2026 – Q1 2027: Phase II (financing) : UNFPA will conduct mid-term evaluations for each pilot, including potential return-on-investment analysis and health outcome measures. These results will inform the development of tailored investment cases and scale-up strategies co-designed with national governments, focusing on advocacy, policy integration, and regulatory adaptation.
Q2 2027: UNFPA will use the evidence to broker innovative financing models in collaboration with local governments, private-sector partners, multi-lateral banks (MDBs) , international financial institutions (IFIs) and donors, ensuring sustainable scale-up. Specific deliverables in this phase include identifying initiatives ready for scale and identifying stakeholders for financing.
Throughout the commitment period, WomenX will document insights, package investment cases, and disseminate global public goods through lessons learned sharing to accelerate scale, replication and cross-pollination within the global women’s health ecosystem.

Background

Despite major advances in healthcare, systemic inequities in women’s health remain largely unaddressed. Globally, women’s health is severely underfunded and under-researched: just 1% of global research and development funding targets women’s health beyond oncology, and only 0.2% focuses on sexual and reproductive health in developing countries (UNFPA, 2025) . This chronic underinvestment fuels disparities, particularly in LMICs, where women face significant barriers to accessing high-quality, innovative healthcare.
Every minute, at least two women die from preventable causes related to pregnancy, childbirth, or reproductive cancers — deaths that could be averted through equitable access to proven solutions (World Health Organization, 2025) . Compounding these challenges, climate change disproportionately affects women’s health by exacerbating food insecurity, increasing disease burdens, and limiting access to care.
Women are not just beneficiaries; they are powerful agents of change. Yet, without focused action and investment, the health gaps they face will continue to widen. WomenX seeks to unlock this potential by accelerating innovation, driving system-level shifts, building market intelligence evidence and catalyzing investment where it matters most.

Progress Update

Partnership Opportunities

The WomenX Collective seeks catalytic funding of $10 million by 2026 to adopt, assess and scale at least five evidence-based, country-led women’s health solutions with a focus on reproductive and maternal health in developing countries. The funding will provide the ability to deploy resources and contributions through a participatory process, enabling innovative financing to support scale.

For the first time, UNFPA has introduced a platform for multi-sector contributions to scale women’s health innovation. WomenX invites co-investment partners and innovative financing collaborators to join this participatory platform, which enables multi-sector contributions for scalable, sustainable health impact.

UNFPA also seeks technical partners to strengthen solution deployment, and advocacy and media partners to amplify the urgency of addressing women’s health disparities and highlight the social and economic benefits of targeted investment. By connecting advanced innovations with local systems, WomenX offers a pioneering opportunity to drive transformative change for women and girls globally.,The UNFPA’s WomenX Collective offers expertise, proven models, and global public goods that extend value beyond individual beneficiaries to organizations, communities, investors, and governments.

By adapting validated innovations to low- and middle-income country contexts and generating robust cost-effectiveness and return-on-investment evidence, WomenX de-risks investments in women’s health and creates transformative pathways to address persistent gender gaps across research, innovation, and health outcomes.

Its “Adopt, Assess, and Scale via Financing” model, grounded in local ownership and supported by UNFPA’s global convening power, offers a scalable blueprint for expanding innovations across additional countries and regions through funding and financing including innovative financing. Thus, the aim is to crowd in private and public sector partners to scale these innovative solutions and positively impact the lives of millions of women and girls.

Indeed the “Collective” in the initiative WomenX Collective commits to collaboration and collective action capitalizing on the women’s health, innovation and innovative financing eco-systems.