WOMEN'S POWER (THEMATIC)

 Around the world and throughout history, women have come together in different types of groups to offer each other support and address barriers together. These groups have created resilience, often in the absence of other safety nets, and fostered opportunities for women and their families. The power of these groups has been rooted in the solidarity that comes from face-to-face connection and joint problem solving.

But what happens when coming together is made impossible by a pandemic? Do these groups help women withstand the crisis? Do the groups themselves survive?

It was clear early in the COVID-19 pandemic that women would be uniquely impacted – as they had been in previous shocks like the 2008 financial crisis and 2014 Ebola epidemic. The question was not whether – but how deeply women would be impacted, how inequities would manifest, and what platforms or policies might offer some support to them.

We quickly brought together our grantees and partners to collect data on impacts, to hear from women directly, and to review evidence on policies that were taking shape (or had worked in the past) to mitigate impacts. With our partners, we tried to understand the gendered economic impacts of the pandemic and to identify gender responsive programs and policies that would put women at the heart of what we knew needed to be an unprecedented recovery effort.

One of the platforms we thought would help women and families weather this storm was women’s groups, or women’s empowerment collectives.

Please read on for more information on why the Gates Foundation supports women’s savings groups, self-help groups, and empowerment collectives in South Asia and Africa, and we believe they can help advance gender equality and be an important part of the economic recovery efforts as countries work to rebuild more inclusive economies. We are so pleased to see women’s empowerment collectives featured as one of the calls to action of this year’s global Generation Equality Forum.

Together with our partners, we are supporting countries in building out national programs that form and link women’s empowerment collectives to economic and social supports and markets. We are also working with innovators to test new digital tools, contextualize and roll out gender and norm-change curricula, test new enterprise development models, and create stronger links to health care and other services—all the while trying to lower the cost of running and scaling up women’s groups.

We’ve seen that when women come together, they can collectively overcome some of the barriers and biases that hold them back, even as we work to rebuild the systems and institutions that created the barriers in the first place.