Jill Sheffield is a global educator and advocate who has worked to promote women’s health and rights around the world for more than three decades.

Sheffield is the founder and President of Women Deliver, a global advocacy organization working to generate political commitment and financial investment for fulfilling Millennium Development Goal 5 – to reduce maternal mortality and achieve universal access to reproductive health. Women Deliver has hosted two groundbreaking conferences in London in 2007 and in Washington, DC in 2010, where more than 3,400 policymakers, activists, business leaders, and public figures from around the world came together to call for action on maternal health.

Most recently, Sheffield was one of few civil society representatives to serve as a Commissioner to support the efforts of the UN Secretary General’s Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health. Sheffield is also the founder of Family Care International (FCI), a distinguished non-governmental organization and winner of the 2008 United Nations Population Award for outstanding work in sexual and reproductive health and rights.

Sheffield completed advanced degrees at Columbia University, Teachers College, where she was later recognized as a distinguished alumna for her international work in women's health and education, and she also received the American Public Health Association's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008. She was Director of International Programmes at the Carnegie Corporation, and founded FCI in 1987 in response to the call at the Women's Decade Conference in Nairobi which identified the silent tragedy that one woman dies each minute from pregnancy related causes. Though she has played a central role in several key world conferences, Sheffield believes her true education came when she worked in the family planning/reproductive health outpatient clinic of Pumwani Maternity Hospital in Nairobi, Kenya.

Inspirational, Activists, Social Justice, Social Entrepreneurship, Mashable, Mashable social good summit, Social Media,