Following our recent research tracking funding for women’s empowerment collectives (WECs) in Kenya, Nigeria and Bangladesh, this blog focuses on women’s groups with WECs elements. Dorcas Mutheu discusses what our research tells us about how these groups are funded and how reporting can be improved for better tracking of funding and impact.
The 2X Challenge has mobilised $11.4bn for women. But what do we know about these investments and how they’re advancing gender equality? Our team has looked back through the data to see how successful the 2X approach has been so far in channelling funds to women and girls. We found a transparency problem – and we’re calling for it to be fixed as part of the certification process.
We’ve produced two new guides for anyone wishing to track international funding for women’s economic empowerment (WEE) or women’s financial inclusion (WFI) in their own country. The guides are based on an approach we’ve developed and tested over the last two years, which is designed so that it can be used and adapted by decision makers, researchers and advocates for their own purposes – including holding funders accountable or advocating for different investments. The new step by step guides are concise, accessible and flexible – signposting to a range of other, more detailed resources.
In November 2021, US Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Samantha Power threw down a challenge for her organisation: by 2025, 25% of USAID’s funding would go to local organisations. The details of how to measure this important metric, however, remains an open question. Given our experience with open data sources, we decided to try to develop a replicable methodology using available data that USAID already publishes. In this blog, Sally Paxton summarises what our exploratory analysis has shown, and how our new methodology can help to track progress towards locally led development.
Identifying the specific groups of women that funding has supported greatly helps us to identify gaps in funding. In this blog, we examine what the data tells us about the groups of women targeted by international funders in Bangladesh, Kenya and Nigeria.
Our women’s economic empowerment team wanted to include as many international funding flows as possible when analysing development assistance data. In this blog, Benjamin Honey explores the pros and cons of merging the two main data sources and describes the methodology we employed.
