Podcast Summary: "Pivotal Ventures on Funding the Future of Women’s Health"

This Week in Global Development
Date: October 28, 2025
Host: Kate Warren (Devex)
Guests: Haven Le (Chief Strategy Officer, Pivotal Ventures), Cecilia Conrad (CEO, Lever for Change)

Overview

This special episode explores how to fund and reimagine women’s health, emphasizing its importance beyond medicine to encompass issues of power, agency, and opportunity. Host Kate Warren speaks with Haven Le from Pivotal Ventures and Cecilia Conrad from Lever for Change about underinvestment in women’s health, the impact of funding cuts, innovative approaches to identifying solutions, and their $250 million global Action for Women's Health initiative.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

The State of Women’s Health: Gaps and Underinvestment

• Historical Context and Persistent Gaps

  • Women's health has faced centuries of neglect and underfunding, stemming from societal expectations for women to "soldier on" and undervaluing women's pain and needs.
  • "Women have been expected to make do, to soldier on, to buck up. And our pain and some degree our suffering has been completely undervalued by society."
    — Haven Le, [03:01]
  • Women spend 25% more of their lives in poor health than men: 9 years on average vs. men’s, with clear diagnostic and care disparities.

• Global Aid Cuts Will Exacerbate Challenges

  • Recent reductions in global health aid, particularly from the U.S., threaten previous gains in maternal health and access to reproductive services.
  • "Cuts in decimation of global aid...is going to have, and perhaps already is having a negative effect on women's health, globally speaking."
    — Haven Le, [04:30]

• Wider Economic and Social Impact

  • Women’s health issues affect families, agricultural productivity, and whole societies, not just individuals or healthcare systems.
  • "When a woman has a health issue, it impacts the family because she's unable to care...it impacts nutrition...It has impacts that are much broader than what I think have been traditionally acknowledged."
    — Cecilia Conrad, [05:10]

Rethinking Funding & Power Structures in Women’s Health

• Traditional Top-Down Funding vs. Open Calls

  • Classic funding models are typically directed from the top, often failing to reflect women’s actual needs on the ground.
  • "Typically it’s a top-down model ... the people deciding the problem aren't necessarily identifying the problems that are most important to those on the ground, particularly women."
    — Cecilia Conrad, [07:10]

• Open Calls and Participatory Models

  • Lever for Change and Pivotal Ventures’ open calls invite diverse, grassroots innovations; applicants assess each others’ projects, democratizing both idea generation and evaluation.
  • Over 4,000 applications from 119 countries for the Action for Women's Health initiative show latent demand and creative energy globally.

Connecting Women’s Health to Agency and Opportunity

• Health as a Prerequisite for Women’s Agency

  • Reliable access to health care underpins women’s ability to participate economically, run for office, and lead—core philanthropic goals for Pivotal Ventures.
  • "Expanding women’s power and influence has been the animating value of Melinda [French Gates]’s philanthropy and leadership for her career."
    — Haven Le, [09:23]
  • Health barriers regularly surface in conversations with women farmers, entrepreneurs, and leaders—regardless of whether the initial topic is economic or political.

• Policy Change and Threats to Agency

  • Policy rollbacks (e.g., the Dobbs decision in the US) exemplify the direct link between women’s health rights and their broader societal power and agency.
  • "A diminishment of women’s power... is also another manifestation of how these two things are inextricably linked right now."
    — Haven Le, [11:38]

The Action for Women's Health Initiative

• Innovative, Equity-Centered Approach
  • The $250M global open call leverages broad outreach and participatory review to democratize funding and surface "hidden" solutions.
  • The process includes initial applications, peer review, expert panel evaluation, and collaboration with the Pivotal Ventures team for final grantmaking.
  • "It makes it really easy for other donors who might have an interest but...have a very small apparatus to...access high quality, fully vetted due diligence projects."
    — Haven Le, [29:47]

Trends & Opportunities Discovered

• Mental Health

  • Seen as profoundly underfunded and under-recognized, especially considering women’s higher rates of depression and the outsized impact on families and economies.
  • "Mental illness actually does pull women out of the workforce. It reduces productivity...it certainly inhibits your ability to care and contribute."
    — Haven Le, [25:36]

• Aging and Menopause

  • Solutions are emerging for the long-ignored effects of women’s aging (brain fog, menopause), which impact quality of life and economic productivity.
  • "There's going to be a billion women who are going to live through their postmenopausal lives in the next five years...If we don't start thinking about solutions...it is going to have a knock-on effect in the economy."
    — Haven Le, [27:13]

• Intersectionality and Vulnerable Populations

  • Innovations also target intersectional needs—support for women with disabilities, culturally sensitive mental health care, and services for refugee women.
  • "I was intrigued by some of the organizations that are working in the intersectional space ... health challenges may manifest themselves differently for women who also have disabilities."
    — Cecilia Conrad, [28:14]

Leveraging Multiple Levers for Systemic Change

• Ecosystem Approach

  • Pivotal Ventures blends grantmaking, advocacy, policy change, and market-driven investments to drive durable, large-scale change.
  • "Not one lever is going to make the difference...we really, really deeply are interested in durable and lasting change."
    — Haven Le, [17:38]
  • New partnerships focus on accelerating R&D (such as with Wellcome Leap) for overlooked areas like osteoporosis and menopause.

• Sustainable Philanthropy

  • Larger, more flexible grants empower grantees with the runway and autonomy to build durable solutions, learning and sharing best practices across communities.
  • "These are grants that, relative to the size of these organizations, are significant enough to give the organizations the runway they need..."
    — Cecilia Conrad, [22:59]

Memorable Moments & Quotes

• On Urgency and Donor Responsibility:
  "Donors don’t need to pull back, need to lean forward. There are easy ways to get capital where it needs to go, if you care about...prioritizing women’s health...Ask boldly, act urgently."
  — Haven Le, [30:49]

• On Surfacing Community-Led Solutions:
  "We are providing a space to discover all of the initiatives and great ideas that may otherwise not come under the radar...giving an opportunity, the space for those on the ground to tell us what the key problems are."
  — Cecilia Conrad, [07:10]

• On Durable Impact:
  "We will be working with the organizations over time to help strengthen their case for funding, to help elevate them with other funding...because the need is now."
  — Cecilia Conrad, [31:21]

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:10] Setting the scene: Why women’s health is critical and underfunded
• [04:30] New threats: Global aid cuts and their impact on women's health
• [06:59] Funding: Traditional models vs. open calls and the importance of bottom-up approaches
• [09:07] Health as a foundation for women’s power and opportunity
• [12:24] Action for Women’s Health: Model behind the $250M open call
• [16:21] Global demand: 4,000+ applications and lessons learned
• [17:22] Leveraging multiple strategies: Grantmaking, advocacy, policy, investment
• [23:44] Funding trends: High interest in mental health and aging
• [28:14] Intersectionality: Addressing unique health barriers for marginalized women
• [29:23] Call to action: How donors and funders can get involved
• [31:03] Supporting grantees beyond funding: Capacity building and visibility

Takeaways

• Women’s health is foundational to broad societal wellbeing, not a niche issue.
• There is innovative, underrecognized work occurring globally—open, participatory models can surface these solutions.
• Systemic, multi-lever approaches are necessary to create durable change—philanthropy, investment, advocacy, and policy must work together.
• The time to act is now—funders are urged to lean in, not pull back, to address both longstanding neglect and new funding challenges.
• More resources and attention to intersectional and life-stage specific issues (mental health, aging, marginalized women) are critical moving forward.

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