The International Women’s Health Summit kicked off Thursday at the Maya Angelou Center for Women's Health & Wellness. The center opened in June.  Dr. Chere Gregory, Medical Director for Neurosciences at Forsyth Medical Center, says more than 50 speakers from different cultures and backgrounds are participating in the event.

“Our goal is to begin to create opportunities for collaboration. There are many people who feel passionately about women’s health but they often work in silos and there isn’t an opportunity to pull all of those experts in one place to really have a solution driven discussion around many of the gender disparities we see in healthcare for women, as well as some of the international disparities that we see when we compare outcomes for children and women throughout the world,” says Gregory.

Some of the topics being discussed at the conference include property rights and legal issues facing women in the United States and around the world, how healthcare reform in the U.S. will impact women and children and financial tips for building assets and taking control of debt.

One of the presenters is Mary Singletary, President of the National Council of Women of the United States, a non-governmental organization at the United Nations. She spoke about a global increase in poverty and hunger, the importance of preschool education, and the agency’s effort to provide prenatal care for women in developing countries.

“A healthy mother gives a healthy baby. But what do we do to help her? So the women who are unable to come into town and are delivering their babies in the villages we give them a mama kit, which is a kit with the essential for delivery. A clean blanket, gloves,” says Singletary.

Singletary is also a registered nurse. She says she’s concerned about teenage girls who are forced to marry and become pregnant at a young age.

Sexual abuse and domestic violence are two issues that resonate with guest speakers Michealene Risley and her friend Betty Makoni from Zimbabwe. Both women were abused as children.

The two teamed up to produce a film titled The Tapestries of Hope. Risley says the film exposes the horrifying myth that raping a virgin cures a man of HIV or AIDS.

 “We as a world need to start paying attention to violence against women and children. It costs the world billions of dollars and dramatically hurts those involved. We have to start taking it seriously and if we look at other countries like where Betty was in Zimbabwe, some of these countries do remarkable work that we need to look at,” says Risley.

 Makoni is founder of Girl Child Network Worldwide, an organization in Zimbabwe that champions the rights of sexually and physically abused children in African Nations, the United States and United Kingdom.

“What really made us come together despite the fact that we are a different color is to make a message to the world that look at us. We are thousands of miles apart but the same story happened, so abuse knows no color, no religion and it’s claiming lives. The empowering message is for me to come and say I’m not born a victim. I was born victorious,” says Makoni.

Kelly Swanson, a motivational speaker and author from High Point talked about self-esteem and psychological impacts on women at the conference. Her message for women is not to take like too seriously.

“That’s my whole approach is to get real with women and take off the face and say yeah, I draw on my eyebrows say something, or on a good day, I’m a size 14. We need to look at ourselves and not take ourselves so seriously. We need to dream big because we deserve it,” says Swanson