She arrived in a modest motorcade with only a couple of officials and stepped out onto a carefully laid red carpet to a bank of photographers. Even in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Crown Princess Mary draws a crowd.
Looking every inch a modern princess, Mary was elegant in a cream dress and a sand-coloured tailored jacket nipped in at the waist with a snakeskin print belt and nude patent stilettos.
Mary is one of a clutch of high profile women — including former US presidential daughters Chelsea Clinton and Barbara Bush, Melinda (wife of Bill) Gates and Norway’s Crown Princess Mette-Marit — adding a dash of pizazz and star power to the extraordinary and impressively organised Women Deliver Conference.
Like a rather fabulous United Nations of women, KL’s slick conference centre in the heart of the bustling, largely Muslim, city is overflowing with more than 3000 bright-eyed, passionate women, from all creeds and cultures with one common goal: empowering women and girls.
This is the third of these global conferences which take place every three years and it’s bigger and better than ever with a list of speakers bulging with luminaries.
The aim is to bring together voices from around the world to call for action to improve the health and wellbeing of girls and women and in particular champion sexual and reproductive rights.
It’s a heady ideal and the air is electric with intelligent plans to make contraception more accessible in the developing world, fight domestic violence, reduce dangerous back street abortions, and invest in girls and women.
It’s an area Princess Mary is heavily involved in, both at home in Denmark and on the world stage with the World Health Organisation and as part of the UN’s 24-person international population and development High-Level Task Force panel.
For Princess Mary, as for many of the speakers here, women’s rights — especially in the developing world — are intrinsically linked to family.
“I am the mother of four beautiful, healthy children,” she said when she took on the United Nations role.
“I know that I was fortunate to give birth in a developed country with good maternal care. I hope for a day where maternal health is equally distributed and women no longer risk life, to give life.”
Trailed by photographers, the Crown Princess sits in the front row in the conference’s main hall and proceedings begin with a surprise video from Hillary Rodham Clinton to rapturous applause. These women mean action.
Princess Mary will be taking part in some of the discussions here in KL in the next couple of days and aww.com.au will also be following her as she takes the opportunity to make some personal visits to schools and hospitals.
