Adrienne Germain, President of IWHC

Adrienne Germain, President of the International Women's Health Coalition, has worked for almost 35 years to promote women's opportunities, health, and rights in developing countries. She is a visionary who helped revolutionize the way the world views population policy by making the health and rights of women central. 

After training in sociology and demography at Wellesley College and the University of California, Berkeley, Adrienne worked at the Population Council and the Ford Foundation in New York City. While at Ford, she designed and managed programs that supported women's work and credit opportunities and advanced girls' and women's health and educational needs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. As Ford's youngest—and first woman—country representative, Adrienne lived in Bangladesh for four years and directed the Foundation's programs in agriculture, rural employment, international economics, women's rights, arts and culture, and reproductive health.

In the mid-1980s, with Joan Dunlop, a longtime advocate for women, Adrienne joined and revitalized the International Women's Health Coalition, turning it into a leading international advocate for women's sexual health and rights.

Adrienne was a U.S. government delegate, core strategist, and negotiator at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD, Cairo), the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women (FWCW, Beijing), and the UN's five year reviews of ICPD and FWCW implementation. Since Cairo and Beijing, she has worked at both the international and country level to put the consensus goals into practice. As part of a consortium of donors, advisers, and agencies, she worked with the Bangladesh government and civil society organizations to design the first national health and population policy based on ICPD principles.

Adrienne served on the Millennium Project Task Force on Child Mortality and Maternal Health, and currently serves on the editorial board of Reproductive Health Matters, the boards of Gender and Rights (Denmark) and BRAC-USA, two Human Rights Watch advisory committees, and the Programme Committee of the 2008 Global Ministerial Forum on Research for Health. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has published extensively on women's health and rights, population, development, and U.S. foreign policy. Adrienne was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Bard College for her longtime "service to the well being of women throughout the world." and was named a Woman of Distinction by the Girl Scouts of Greater New York in October 2005.

Photo of Adrienne Germain by Todd France.