Her story matters.
We believe in the power of storytelling.
The Global Women’s Narratives Project
OUR MISSION: Through our archival platform, we engage the personal and collective power of women’s lived experiences to create a database of narratives that storytellers, policymakers, scholars, lawyers, health practitioners, and human rights advocates can use to effect change.
OUR VISION: We want to end systemic harm to women worldwide. To this end, we gather and amplify women’s stories to drive change across war, health, law, religion, and human rights, dismantling harmful systems and fostering personal and collective healing.
The Challenge of Visibility
Women's lived experiences remain significantly underrepresented in both policy development and research. This persistent gap in understanding creates serious blind spots in decision-making systems and policy agendas, including human rights mechanisms that fail to account for women’s realities.
The consequences are far-reaching, undermining physical and mental health, security, and economic opportunity for half the global population. Our work directly addresses this gap by amplifying women’s narratives and generating evidence-based insights to inform policy, strengthen accountability, and advance women’s wellbeing and dignity.
THEMES: WAR & PEACE | RELIGION | HEALTH | LIFE’S WORK | GBV | IDENTITY | WOMEN IN POLITICS
What We Believe
Narratives gathered from 41 countries:
United States, Ireland, Syria, Egypt, Georgia, United Kingdom, Bosnia, Mexico, Jordan, Zimbabwe, India, Israel, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sweden, China, Nicaragua, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Cameroon, El Salvador, Finland, Greece, Hong Kong, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Kenya, Korea, Malaysia, Peru, Poland, Serbia, South Africa, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, United Arab Emirates.
GWNP’s Process
We partner with communities of women to amplify their individual and collective stories. We are building a global searchable database of tens of thousands of women’s stories—lived experiences from across war zones, healthcare systems, political realities, and cultural landscapes.
Through specialized training, we prepare individuals to bear witness and document these narratives with sensitivity, cultural awareness, and ethical care.
These narratives collectively will inform region-specific practices, periodic reviews, and UNHRC shadow reports to drive meaningful new policy in war, health, law, religion, and human rights. Narratives are edited by our volunteer teams based in Oxford and Los Angeles and added to our web platform of women’s stories across themes and countries. The GWNP archival project is part of the primary mission of our parent nonprofit organization, the Oxford Initiative for Global Ethics and Human Rights (OI).
We are pleased to share our project with UNESCO and the Institute of Social Ethics, University of Lucerne for Geneva Peace Week. GWNP Thembela Lubimbi participated on behalf og GWNP from Zimbabwe. A special thank you to Dr. Evelyne Tauchnitz, our Advisory Board member from Oxford Global PeaceTech Project and Lucerne Graduate School in Ethics, and our UNESCO collaborators, Vincent Defourny and Edouard Joubeaud.
Danielle Perez, stand-up comedian and disabled woman, interviewed by Elisa D'Angelo in Los Angeles, CA.
The hillside in Bosnia where Lena Perenchio listened to six women's narratives about their lives and experiences during their war and the decades that followed.
Tanvi Kodali, Wellesley student and GWNP senior editor, interviews Rohingya women refugees.