Françoise Girard is an author, activist, and expert on women’s health, human rights, sexuality, and HIV and AIDS. An attorney by training, Girard is frequently consulted by governments as well as UN agencies and has been instrumental in making sure that global policy frameworks comprise and further women’s rights. She just finished eight years as President of the International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC).
What she did as an activist?
Françoise Girard - Women's health organization leader played a key role in advocacy on sexual as well as reproductive health and women’s rights at UN conferences like the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) +5, Beijing+5, General Assembly Special Sessions on HIV/AIDS and on Children, ICPD+10, the 2005 World Summit (Millennium Development Goals), and the procedure to negotiate the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals.
From 1999 to 2003, she was Senior Program bureaucrat for International Policy at IWHC, and afterward a consultant for IWHC, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and DAWN, a network of women’s rights advocates from the global South. Before revisiting to IWHC in 2012, she was administrator of the Public Health Program at Open Society Foundations, where she was also Regional Director for Central and Eastern Europe and Haiti in the 1990s.
Girard has served on the board of the Women’s Funding Network as well as on the advisory committee of Human Rights Watch’s program on health and human rights. She was the leader of the Leadership Programme Committee of the 2010 International AIDS conference, a twenty thousand plus participant biannual scientific conference.
Girard’s Education
Girard embraces an M.A. in Political Science (Soviet Politics) from McGill University plus an LL.B. from the Université de Montréal. Françoise Girard iwhc was a rule clerk to Justice Charles Gonthier of the Supreme Court of Canada. She different languages such as French, Spanish, as well as Russian. She is a devotee of baroque music plus opera and chairs the board of American Friends of Les Arts Florissants, a baroque ensemble based in Paris.
