COVID-19 has presented the greatest test to national health systems and the provision of international public health for over a hundred years. According to Johns Hopkins University (2021), as of 17 October 2021, it has caused 4,896 million deaths globally; we do not yet know the numbers, which will run to millions, of people affected by the long-term physical and socio-economic consequences of the virus. Two years since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic on 11 March 2020, this health crisis is far from over.

Moreover, as we have shown here, COVID-19 is not just a global health crisis. It is a gendered crisis of governance, equity and development. The pandemic has exposed the gendered social, economic and cultural fault lines of inequality within and between countries. These inequalities manifest through health inequalities – or the ‘avoidable, unfair and systematic differences in health between different groups of people’, according to Williams et al (2020). As we show in Chapter One, gender is one of the most significant determinants in shaping unequal health outcomes, and how gender intersects with race and ethnicity, age, dis/ ability, sexuality, migrant status, geography and – above all – poverty, exacerbates risk for many groups of women.

COVID-19 has revealed the profound weaknesses in our governance systems at international and national levels. At the international level, since 1989, efforts have been made to construct a liberal system of global governance, based on a somewhat contradictory mix of systems that seek to balance markets versus regulation; Western-inspired values of human rights versus power politics; nationalism versus globalization; rhetorical commitments to diversity versus practices of institutionalized racism, ableism and misogyny, and citizenship versus exclusion. Global development has proved one of the major sites of conflict within those cleavages. The articulation of a (weak) global plan for more equitable and sustainable development came together in 2015 through the SDGs. This was the first agenda for international development based not on the principles of economic growth, but on the importance of people (Hulme, 2010; Hulme and Scott, 2010), and it reflected the trend that associated development with civil society, partnership, the promotion of human rights and the adoption of pro-democratic norms (Welzel et al, 2003).