Kate Bourne
Vice President, International Policy and Regional Programs

As IWHC's Vice President for International Policy and Regional Programs, Kate Bourne manages a team of regional specialists who oversee financial and technical support of IWHC's colleagues in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and helps link their work to IWHC's international policy objectives. Kate has extensive international experience in family planning, reproductive health, and HIV/AIDS, and a strong history of connecting global policies to women's local needs and priorities throughout her career.

Motivated to pursue a career in global women's health by encounters she had with women while traveling across Asia in the 1980s, Kate secured her Master's in Public Health in 1989, and then spent three years in Beijing, China as a consultant to UNFPA (the United Nations Population Fund). Among other projects, she was involved in the early stages of the model counties program, a UNFPA initiative that sought to reduce coercive practices in Chinese population policies by drawing attention to successful examples of humanized, rights-based care within the Chinese health system. During her time in China Kate also helped draw attention to the need for further research on the country's widening sex ratio, resulting from a combination of cultural son preference and state-controlled fertility.

From 1994 to 1998, Kate was Country Representative for Vietnam with Pathfinder International. She moved to Vietnam shortly after the country reestablished relations with the United States, and spent four years developing and managing a program to improve the quality of reproductive health care in several Vietnamese provinces. She worked with doctors, nurses, and government officials to strengthen health system management and standards of care, expand contraceptive choices, introduce new abortion technologies, and build health workers' counseling skills. In 1998 Ms. Bourne returned to the United States and served as Pathfinder's Director of Public Affairs until 2001, during which time she helped bring local advocates' knowledge to bear in advocacy for increased U.S. investment in family planning and reproductive health worldwide.

Before joining IWHC in May 2005, Kate was Executive Vice President and later Vice President for Country and Regional Programs at the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), a global organization working toward discovery, development, and distribution of an AIDS vaccine. During her tenure at IAVI, Kate helped internationalize the organization, building partnerships in developing countries among community groups, health professionals, government ministries, advocates, donors, and scientists. She worked to develop ethical, participatory practices for IAVI's clinical trials and to come up with sustainable solutions for the challenges associated with vaccine development and distribution. In particular, she supported efforts to identify and address stigma and discrimination faced by women seeking to participate in clinical trials.

Kate holds a Master's of Public Health degree in International and Family Health from the University of Texas in Houston, and a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She speaks Chinese and basic Vietnamese.