Guides & Tools

Through the course of the Women’s Economic Empowerment project we have, in consultation with a broad range of stakeholders, developed and tested a new methodology to track international funding for women’s economic empowerment (WEE), women’s financial inclusion (WFI), women’s empowerment collectives (WECs), and to assess funders’ gender integration. We are keen to share our learning from this innovative and rigorous approach and have published all our detailed methodologies below.

For anyone wishing to undertake similar research in their own country contexts, the two step by step guides are a great place to start. They describe how you can collect and analyse international funding data to better understand the funding directed to WEE and gender equality.

Step by step guides

How to Track International Funding to Women’s Economic Empowerment – A Step by Step Guide

How to Track International Funding to Women’s Financial Inclusion – A Step by Step Guide

Methodology documents

WEE Methodology

In this document we outline in full detail the research approach, definitions and steps we took to track international funding to WEE, WFI and WECs as well as unpaid care work at a country-level.

WEE Data Collection Methodology

This data collection methodology gets into the detail of how we selected data sources for this study, the advantages and disadvantages of each, as well as the approach we developed to merge data from four sources to produce singular country datasets for analysis.

Data Merging Methodology Using SQL

This guide explains our approach to merging data from different data sources using SQLite. This approach refines the techniques outlined in our WEE Data Collection Methodology to offer a replicable approach for merging project level data from OECD-DAC CRS and IATI that has applications for tracking funding more broadly than WEE.