Gender and Women's Empowerment: Resource Guide
<< Back to Gender and Women's Empowerment page
The Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI): AFI is working to successfully integrate policies for women’s financial inclusion into each stage of national financial inclusion strategy (NFIS) design and implementation through its Financial Inclusion Strategy (FIS) Working Group. A special sub-group of the Financial Inclusion Data (FID) Working Group has also been established to develop tools, build capacity and promote best practices in collecting and using sex-disaggregated data. The Denarau Action Plan promotes the development and implementation of smart policies and regulations by members of the AFI Network to create an enabling environment that accelerates women’s financial inclusion. It also emphasizes the importance of measuring and evaluating our progress. The Action Plan fosters strong partnership and collaboration with financial service providers to drive private sector leadership.
CARE International: CARE’s commitment to women’s empowerment and gender equality is based on decades of expertise in dozens of countries and in every development sector. CARE sees gender as a cross-cutting issue that is addressed in every program to make an equal world free of poverty. CARE uses a Gender Transformative Approach - program strategies that seek to build social attitudes, behaviors, and structures that support gender equality for people and communities. CARE does this by focusing on women’s empowerment and men’s engagement.
FHI360: FHI 360 integrates a gender perspective into development programs to improve outcomes and increase equality among girls, boys, women and men. Effective gender strategies transform unequal norms and behaviors, empower women and girls, and engage men and boys as partners and agents of positive social change.
Global Banking Alliance for Women (GBA): Global Banking Alliance for Women is a global consortium of financial institutions dedicated to supporting banks as they capture the opportunity of the women’s market. Membership in GBA provides financial institutions access to a unique global community of peers that have proven the business case for serving women. As a close network of practitioners, the GBA provides a wide range of services to help organizations design, implement and refine effective women’s market programs. GBA also seeks to use its collective voice to advocate for greater awareness of women’s vital economic role as consumers, investors and job-creating entrepreneurs.
Grameen Foundation: For the past 5 years, Grameen Foundation has been integrating gender more thoughtfully into its programming and research efforts. Research on resilience as well as projects that intentionally design gender dialogues are providing insights into the building blocks that are necessary to break through gender barriers, such as workload issues, mobility, and decision-making power. Grameen is currently collaborating with International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) on testing of the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index in hopes of having experience and a practical tool for understanding women's empowerment across Grameen projects.
GSMA Connected Women Programme:The Connected Women Programme works with mobile operators and their partners to address the barriers women experience in accessing and using mobile internet and mobile money services. The goal of the program is to reduce the gender gap in mobile internet and mobile money services in low- and middle-income countries, and unlock significant commercial and socio-economic opportunities.
Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA): Innovations for Poverty Action partners with service providers, governments, and researchers to design and test financial services and programs that help households better manage their finances. With over 130 completed and ongoing randomized evaluations in 29 countries, IPA’s Financial Inclusion Program seeks to identify effective solutions to promote healthy financial behavior and shares results to inform the work of financial service providers and governments around the world.
Oxfam: Oxfam works on women’s economic empowerment in over 40 countries on a range of multi-country programs, predominantly focused on achieving economic empowerment for rural women. Oxfam applies a "dual approach" that seeks to both create better livelihood opportunities and remove the structural barriers that limit women’s economic choices and erode their rights.
United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), SHIFT: In 2014, UNCDF launched Shaping Inclusive Finance Transformations (SHIFT). SHIFT seeks to connect the poorest and most vulnerable - especially women and small businesses owned, managed or predominantly serving women - to formal financial services in several Southeast Asian countries. By 2020, SHIFT aims to transition at least six million low-income people, micro-entrepreneurs and owners of small- and medium-sized businesses to formal financial services. At least 65% of these people will be women and 100% of the businesses will be owned or managed by women, employ women or predominantly serve women.
Women’s World Banking (WWB): Women’s World Banking works closely with its global network of 49 financial institutions from 32 countries to create new credit, savings, and insurance products specifically designed for the unique needs of low-income women. Women’s World Banking has found new ways to help women build financial safety nets, by showing a broader range of financial institutions how to move beyond traditional microfinance to provide financial products that include savings and insurance.
World Bank Africa Gender Innovation Lab (GIL): The World Bank’s Africa Region Gender Innovation Lab (GIL) conducts impact evaluations which assess the outcome of development interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa, to generate evidence on how to close the gender gap in earnings, productivity, assets, and agency. With the results of impact evaluations, the GIL supports the design of innovative, scalable interventions to address gender inequality across Africa. The goal is to enable project teams and policymakers to advocate for better gender integration using evidence.