For decades, women’s health sat at the margins of medicine. Now, a new generation is pushing it to the centre. One of them is Sara Al-Dafaee, CEO and Co-Founder of the Nordic Women’s Health Hub, a Nordic NGO accelerating innovation in women’s health.
Two years ago, the Nordic Women’s Health Hub was a grassroots initiative with no funding and no fixed address. Today it is a registered NGO headquartered in Copenhagen, with more than 45 volunteers across the Nordics and international contributors beyond, an influential voice heard and recognized in Danish Parliament, and a charter for the region’s health systems to work towards through 2040.
Sara, co-founder and CEO of the Hub, talks through what built that momentum, why women’s health is still treated as a niche despite being anything but, and the funding gap holding back some of the sector’s most promising companies.
What is Nordic Women’s Health Hub, and what are its aims?
We launched as a grassroots initiative in 2024 to correct something that had gone unaddressed for far too long: medical research relied primarily on male biology until the 1990s, and women’s health was left to catch up ever since. We’re now headquartered in Copenhagen, and we’ve grown into a funded and recognised NGO with partners such as embassies and more than 45 volunteers across the Nordics, alongside contributors internationally.
We structure our work around four pillars. Innovation is about accelerating early-stage solutions and connecting startups with the resources they need. Advocacy is where we push for the policy changes that actually mandate and fund women’s health research. Partnerships is our cross-sector work, building the industry networks that make progress possible. And knowledge is where we generate ecosystem insights and public datasets, because so much of this field still runs on gaps rather than evidence.
One of the initiatives I’m proudest of is our Nordic Women’s Health Innovation Ecosystem Mapping, which will launch as a dynamic database of the actors working in this space. We also developed the Vision 2040 Women’s Health Charter, which came out of a workshop with the Danish Parliament and launched formally in December 2025 at the Finnish Embassy in Denmark, together with the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies. And to keep visibility high, we run dedicated event spaces like the FemTech Lounge at TechBBQ.
What are the biggest challenges facing the sector right now?
There are different challenges depending on whether you’re looking at innovation or advocacy and knowledge. On the innovation side, the main issue is that startups in this field often have to generate foundational evidence and undertake costly clinical validation before their solutions are considered investment-ready. They have to conduct research that simply don’t exist yet. Angel investors and VC funds tend to want to invest in commercially ready businesses, so startups in women’s health end up looking for funding just to be able to create the research in the first place. So who funds that? Is it the state, is it investors, is it the funds?
That’s one of the open questions.
Then there’s the more systemic challenge: women’s health is often treated as synonymous with reproductive health, but it isn’t only that. We know that across more than 770 diseases affecting both men and women, women get diagnosed on average four years later, and that’s despite women visiting the doctor more often. Cardiovascular disease, thyroid disease, autoimmune diseases all disproportionately affect women, even though none of those would typically be filed under “women’s health.”
So part of the work is getting people to understand that this isn’t a niche, it’s half the population, and it isn’t only reproductive. It’s any area where the research hasn’t caught up, and where we assume symptoms present the same way in women as they do in men, when they don’t.
Are there any breakthroughs among the companies in the Hub’s Nordic Women’s Health ecosystem that you would point to as genuinely innovative?
Quite a few. We have more than 140 actors mapped right now working across areas like reproductive health, menopause and women’s oncology, so it’s hard to single any one out because the work across the board is strong. For most of them, the main challenge now is attracting capital, not just to scale, but to make sure their solutions actually stay and benefit the Nordics.
We have a reimbursement issue here too: the Nordics run public healthcare sectors, so there’s a job of convincing decision-makers why these solutions are worth investing in and what the reimbursement pathway should look like, which is a very different picture from a market like the US.
There’s a lot of genuine innovation happening in women’s health, but the real question is how to make sure it reaches the people who need it, rather than only those with the resources to pay for it. Wearables are one area I’m watching closely, since they’re becoming one of the main tools collecting real data on women’s health.
What is your own background, and what led you to this work?
I never expected to end up doing NGO work. My background is commercial — I have a master’s in social science. While I was studying, I spent six months travelling in Asia, and in Japan I became fascinated by how integrated technology was in their healthcare system, with automated clinics and so on. I came back to the Nordics convinced that if we could do something similar here, we could be front-runners.
When I started looking into health tech more seriously, I realised quickly that the problem was never really about the technology, it was about the lack of data. The data being fed into these systems simply didn’t represent women. And it wasn’t only women — other minorities, whether sexual or ethnic, weren’t represented either. Once I understood that, it didn’t make sense to me to implement technology on top of input that skewed, because the output would inevitably be skewed too.
That led me into consultancy work, giving talks on AI in healthcare and bias, including to the Ministry of Health. Along the way, I realised very few was actually working on this systemically, and that’s how I met my three co-founders at the Nordic Women’s Health Hub. We took what had been an unorganized, unfunded initiative and turned it into a proper organisation. A lot has happened in the past year alone.
I am proud to say that we have contributed to building momentum alongside many strong actors and allies by mobilizing people for change resulting in Denmark last year allocating funding to establish a women’s health research centre.
