What Was Always Written: Inside 20 Years Of The Cartier Women’s Initiative

Photo: GRAZIA

The most enduring stories, more often than not, don’t begin with a single moment. They begin long before anyone is actually watching, written slowly in a language that only becomes legible across the years.

Vriko Yu understands this exact rhythm better than most. Armed with a PhD in biological sciences and a conviction that coral restoration demands more than mere observation, the Hong Kong-born scientist founded Archireef, a UAE-based nature-tech company, with outposts in Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia and Singapore, and dedicated to rebuilding degraded marine ecosystems. The goal? To equip coral restoration for the long game, complete with bio-engineered reef tiles 3D-printed from ocean-friendly terracotta. It’s with these tools that corals, which are planted on Archireef structures, show a reported 95 per cent survival rate after three years, more than four times higher than traditional methods.

But this shows what is possible when science and patience come together, as well as the right support. Yu is perhaps the perfect embodiment of the question Cartier asked 20 years ago: what happens when you back a woman whose work is building something the world won’t fully see for generations?

The answer is simple: you change what the future looks like. This is exactly what the Cartier Women’s Initiative (CWI) was built on in 2006, a conviction also rooted in the Maison’s DNA. Two decades on, the programme has supported 330 entrepreneurs across 66 countries, distributing approximately US$14.1 million in financial support.

Photo: GRAZIA

In fact, the CWI has arguably constructed its very own living system, one that compounds over time. Financial capital, in the form of grants reaching up to US$100,000 for firstplace regional winners; human capital, through an in-person entrepreneurship programme with INSEAD business school, executive leadership coaching, and skills-based training; and social capital – access to a global community of over 520 active members that, for many fellows, becomes the most enduring part of the experience.

As Kiyo Taga, CWI Director, highlights, the programme in itself goes far beyond the capital rewards: “We do believe that when women thrive, humanity thrives. The initiative is making it possible for women entrepreneurs – especially those who have historically been underfunded – to access the resources, recognition and community they need to transform their ideas into thriving, impactful businesses.”

This sentiment is exemplified across generations of fellows, with alumni from previous editions continuing to shape the ecosystem of the CWI, whether it’s mentoring newer cohorts, forging partnerships or even returning as honourees in their own right.

Take Namita Banka, for example – a 2013 fellow who went on to become a 2025 Impact Awardee. “The Cartier Women’s Initiative is more than a recognition platform,” she affirms. “It’s a community – one that believed in us early, stayed connected and amplified our story globally.”

Continuing that lineage is, of course, the 2026 cohort, which consists of 30 fellows across 10 award categories. Alongside Vriko Yu’s UAE-based Archireef, which sits within the Middle East and North Africa category, Egypt’s Salma Tammam is leading the charge in developing affordable molecular diagnostic kits for infectious diseases in underresourced healthcare settings with her company Reme-D, while Morocco’s Nidal Tafah is creating resilient livelihoods for fragile smallholder farms with her solar-powered smart irrigation company MIRRIAH.

Photo: GRAZIA

It’s a fitting regional cohort for a programme celebrating its 20th year. Beyond the region, it embodies an impressive span of businesses and concepts, from AI-enabled retinal screening in Mexico to fintech credit access in Cameroon, and from techenabled beekeeping for women in rural India to wearable femtech solutions for chronically deprioritised women’s health concerns in Australia. Their average age is 35. Seventy-seven per cent employ majority-women workforces. What unites them is not geography or sector, but a particular orientation towards time – the capacity to build for a future they can envision even when the world cannot, but something that arguably was always written.

To mark this milestone anniversary, the CWI is celebrating under the theme of ‘Lighting the Path’, reflecting on how that path has looked over the last two decades. Having grown from a single annual prize to a year-round fellowship, expanded its categories and created a lifelong community, the initiative continues to evolve. Although the programme has evolved substantially since its inception, the essential logic remains. It’s simple: the most transformative investments are the ones made early, in people who are bringing long-term impact rather than immediate visibility. The luxury industry often operates on that immediacy and visibility. Yet, just like Cartier itself, which will turn 180 years old next year, the CWI looks to longevity.

It’s that commitment to longevity that perhaps separates the programme from other entrepreneurship initiatives. Th e fellowship doesn’t end at the ceremony or expire with a grant. In fact, it compounds in the shared understanding that building something meaningful requires more than just a good idea; it requires people who see what you see.

This is what Vriko Yu is doing in the Arabian Gulf, where Archireef’s reef tiles are slowly but surely helping ecosystems return to life. It will be years before the picture fully emerges, but it’s already set in motion. Twenty years into its own story, and with many more to come, the Cartier Women’s Initiative underpins that important changes are rarely announced – they accumulate, quietly and persistently, until one day they are impossible to ignore.

“what was always written” IS PUBLISHED IN THE 18TH EDITION OF GRAZIA MIDDLE EAST. ORDER YOUR COPY HERE.