About

Too often, images from low- and middle-income countries focus on poverty and tremendous need rather than what we see everywhere we go: women in decision-making roles, working to earn income, and accessing and providing reproductive health information and services to care for themselves and their families.

With this in mind, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation worked with Getty Images in 2015 and 2017 to create a library of powerful, positive and high-quality images showing women’s work and family life around the world. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation added hundreds of photographs to the collection beginning in 2018.

All photographs are available—free of charge—to non-commercial users thanks to Creative Commons licensing (CC-BY-NC 4.0). The photos funded by the Hewlett Foundation are also available for licensing to Getty Images’ global customer base of creative agencies, businesses, news organizations, and other editorial clients. Photographs were taken by Jonathan Torgovnik, Paula Bronstein, Juan Arredondo, Nina Robinson, Yagazie Emezi, Maheder Haileselassie Tadese, Ley Uwera, and Mansi Midha for Getty Images.

The images show the connection between women’s work, their health, and ability to care for themselves and their families in 13 countries around the world: Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Peru, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Thailand, Uganda, and the United States. They also show women as active participants in their communities, accessing and providing quality reproductive health information and services, and advocating for better working conditions.

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has long supported organizations that work to ensure women have full and fair opportunities to earn a living and can choose whether and when to have a family. Similarly, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation supports reproductive health advocates, researchers, and providers to advance quality sexual and reproductive health and rights.

The Images of Empowerment show several non-profit organizations the foundations support, including the African Population and Health Research Center, Amref Health Africa, Marie Stopes International, TOSTAN, the Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), the Centre for Catalyzing Change, Ipas Development Foundation, the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies, Teen Health Mississippi, the Imbuto Foundation, Medical Students for Choice, Development Expertise Center, Family Guidance Association of Ethiopia, the Youth Network for Sustainable Development, Fonds pour les Femmes Congolaises (Fund for Congolese Women), Si Jeunesse Savait, and more.

Since the collection launched in 2015, we’ve seen the images used by dozens of nonprofits, at major international conferences like Women Deliver, and by media including the New York Times, Vox, and the Guardian.

Like the Getty Images Lean In Collection that provides powerful depictions of women and girls especially in the United States, these 2,000 images show women living, working and organizing around the world.

We hope you will use them to tell women’s stories, and to show what their lives and choices looks like.

Use these images? Share your story.