On 9th – 11th July 2026, representatives from Merseyside Sports Partnership (MSP) joined 1,000 global leaders, practitioners, and changemakers in Birmingham for the IWG Global Summit 2026.
The quadrennial summit is the world’s foremost gathering dedicated to advancing gender equality in movement, physical activity, and sport.
This year’s theme, “Beyond the Breakthrough,” focused not just on celebrating recent progress in women’s sports, but on ensuring that change is structural, sustainable, and embedded into systems at every level.
The presence of the Liverpool City Region (LCR) delegation at the summit was a testament to our commitment to turning global declarations into tangible local action.
The MSP team in attendance included CEO Justine Blomeley and our newly appointed Women & Girls Systems Change Lead, Emma McKenna, alongside other colleagues dedicated to gender equity in movement, physical activity, and sport.
Crucially, this wasn’t an isolated effort. The summit highlighted the importance of our sister-city-region approach, with MSP attending alongside colleagues from Greater Manchester Moving.
This joint presence underscored the significance of the landmark signing of the Brighton Plus Helsinki Declaration last October, where Liverpool City Region and Greater Manchester became the first place-based signatories. In the declaration’s 30-year history.
Our collaborative approach was further strengthened by the attendance of key partners, including Gemma Ireland from St Helens Borough Council and Lee-Victoria Davies from the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority’s Active Travel team, demonstrating that creating safer, more equitable environments for women and girls requires cross-sector commitment.
The summit being in the UK offered an opportunity to showcase LCR’s ongoing gender equity work on the global stage. A major highlight was a Shift Session featuring our CEO, Justine Blomeley, alongside a panel who helped to tell the LCR story:
Their presentation – on How to translate a Global Declaration into Local Action for Women and Girls – confronted the stark realities facing women in our region and outlined our strategic response.
Speaking from their own perspectives, the panel emphasised that complex, systemic problems require a fundamentally different approach. Rather than operating in silos, they showcased how LCR is building a replicable, place-based blueprint.
The presentation detailed our strategy: securing leadership buy-in via a top-level, devolved mandate (backed by the Metro Mayor), and building a unified, region-wide plan that connects grassroots realities directly to policy.
The core message to the international audience was clear: this cross-system buy-in is a methodology that can be translated to other global contexts.
By highlighting our cross-system working group and growing movement of 48 pledgers – ranging from the Liverpool County FA She Inspires initiative to the Active Travel Team developing safer streets – the panel provided a practical route for others to follow. They demonstrated that genuine progress is possible when an entire system collaborates across the socio-ecological model.
The IWG Global Summit 2026 was an inspiring and critical milestone, but the real work continues on the ground in our communities and organisations.
Approaches like LCR’s have been shared, ready to be translated to different global contexts. Now that the recent Summit is behind us, we (and delegates from across the world) can start to work towards the impacts and outcomes that will shape the next.
Watch this space for more reflections from the IWG Global Summit 2026 and how it will shape our work in Liverpool City Region.
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