Jill Sheffield

Jill Sheffield is a global educator and advocate for maternal, reproductive, and sexual health and rights and the founder of Women Deliver and Family Care International.

Sheffield's commitment to reproductive rights for women in developing countries began while volunteering as a teacher for a family planning clinic at the Pumwani Maternity Hospital in Kenya in the 1960s. While the feminist movement flourished at home in the United States, the Kenyan women Sheffield met through the clinic were legally prohibited from using contraception without their husbands’ permission. This inequity became the driving force in Sheffield's transition from teaching to being a global crusader for women’s reproductive, sexual, and maternal rights.

In 1987, Sheffield co-founded Family Care International (FCI), a non-profit global organization committed to improving the maternal health of women in the world's poorest nations, and served as its president for 20 years. FCI was the first international organization founded specifically to focus on the plight of the 500,000 women dying in pregnancy and childbirth yearly and to put safe motherhood on the global agenda. In particular, Sheffield and FCI played a critical role in leading the Safe Motherhood Initiative, which helped guide global efforts to improve maternal health since 1987. Under Sheffield, FCI's portfolio grew to implementing projects, conducting evaluations, and finding new solutions and tools to improve maternal health.

In 2007, Sheffield founded Women Deliver – originally a global conference focused on maternal health that evolved into an international advocacy organization dedicated to galvanizing action on maternal health and women's empowerment. Women Deliver works globally to generate political will and commitment and financial investment for Millennium Development Goal 5—reducing maternal mortality and achieving universal access to reproductive health. The organization's message is that maternal health is both a human right and a practical necessity for sustainable development. Women Deliver has organized two large-scale, global conferences on maternal health and is fast becoming the global source of information for advocacy and action on maternal health. The first conference was held in London in 2007 and drew nearly 2,000 participants from 115 countries and the second conference was held in Washington, D.C. in 2010 and drew nearly 3,500 participants from 146 countries.

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