Investing in Grassroots Women Leaders for Last-Mile Impact
As global priorities around gender and development continue to shift, there is growing interest in approaches that can deliver outcomes at scale across sectors such as women’s health, gender-based violence, child marriage, and girls’ education.
This session focuses on a segment that remains largely overlooked in these conversations: women leaders in grassroots governance.
India has over 1.4 million elected women representatives in Panchayati Raj Institutions. This is one of the largest existing platforms for women’s leadership globally, yet it remains underleveraged in funding and programmatic approaches. These women leaders in Panchayats are not merely participants but torchbearers of an inclusive, women-led development model
C3’s work centres on activating this cohort as sustainable drivers of last-mile delivery and social change. Strengthening the leadership of women in local governance has shown the potential to influence outcomes across sectors, including girls’ education, reproductive health, gender-based violence, and broader social norm change, helping translate global goals into local action.
The session builds on this premise. It positions grassroots women leaders not as a standalone area of investment, but as a practical pathway to achieving outcomes across multiple development priorities. Their journeys testify to the indomitable spirit of women who continue striving to catalyze gender-transformative, equitable, SDG-aligned governance — proving the merit and efficacy of women-led development.
Why attend
This is a small, invite-only discussion designed for depth and exchange.
Participants will engage with a perspective that connects funding priorities to implementation realities. The conversation will focus on whether current approaches are overlooking leadership structures that already exist, are embedded within systems, and are capable of scale.
For funders and practitioners working across health, education, gender-based violence, or social norm change, this offers a grounded lens on where and how investments can translate into sustained impact.
Objectives
To position grassroots women leaders in governance as an underleveraged pathway for last-mile delivery and social change
To demonstrate how investing in this cohort can drive outcomes across sectors such as education, health, and gender equity
To bring forward evidence on the return on investment of strengthening leadership within public systems
To connect global funding priorities with scalable, implementation-grounded approaches
To create space for focused dialogue and potential collaboration among a curated set of participants