From vision to action

NORA was born out of the work with the Nordic Charter for Women’s Health 2040.

In 2025, 136 experts from across the Nordic women’s health ecosystem gathered at the Danish Parliament in Copenhagen. Starting with a vision for 2040 - brought to life through the story of Nora, a fictional but evidence-based woman whose life journey illustrates how women’s health could be addressed differently than it is today - participants worked backwards to identify the reforms, system changes and shifts in norms needed to make that vision a reality.

Learn more about the Nordic Charter for Women’s Health 2040 →

NORA’s mission is to turn this vision into action.

The challenge we’re tackling: A low-priority equilibrium

Women’s health is a major societal and economic opportunity, yet it has historically not been prioritised at the scale of its importance. You could say it is trapped in a low-priority equilibrium.

The problem is often framed as a lack of funding. But we believe the deeper problem is the absence of a system that produces the evidence, infrastructure, signals and connections needed to make opportunities in women’s health visible, measurable and fundable.

Or as World Economic Forum describes it: Without a robust understanding of women’s underlying biology, it’s harder to build, validate and scale effective products for women. This evidence gap drives a perception of higher investment risk and lower return on investment, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of underinvestment.

NORAs hypothesis

Breaking this self-reinforcing cycle requires coordinated initiatives that create both market push and market pull.

And we need to address critical gaps directly while also changing the conditions that perpetuate them.

Drawing on the Nordic Charter for Women’s Health 2040 and its Implementation Playbook, NORA works across three interconnected areas where both action and system change are needed:

• Evidence & data infrastructure - addressing gaps in the evidence and data infrastructure

• Translation & adoption - strengthening the structures and conditions that move evidence into clinical practice and create feedback loops through which real-world experience generates new evidence

• Capital coordination - building the mechanisms that enable different forms of capital to work together and find high-leverage opportunities

Why does the Nordics need a platform organisation like NORA?

Women’s health spans research, healthcare, innovation, policy and capital - each with different mandates, incentives, funding structures and time horizons. Yet the challenges are interconnected, while efforts to address them too often happen in silos.

NORA works across these boundaries, bringing together people, organisations and capital across the Nordics to identify shared opportunities and turn fragmented efforts into coordinated action. As an enabling and coordinating platform, we help address the systemic barriers that no single organisation can overcome alone.