Our regular news roundup, featuring new step by step guides to tracking finance for women’s economic empowerment and the chance to catch up on recent events on DFI transparency and funding for care.
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.
This newsletter introduces our new research programme examining USAID’s funding to local organisations, the latest findings on funding for women’s economic empowerment in Ethiopia, Pakistan and Uganda, plus insights on how the Liberian government is using aid data.
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.
A new study has concluded that it is not currently possible to track national funding for women’s economic empowerment in Ethiopia, and calls on the government to require public bodies to collect and report gender-disaggregated data for the projects they implement. The study was conducted by Three B Consult and commissioned by Publish What You Fund.
Our new assessment of national funding for women’s economic empowerment (WEE) in Uganda has highlighted an increase in resources allocated to gender and equity programmes over the last five years (2015/16 – 2020/21). However, allocations for WEE remain generally low, the released funds are often less than what has been approved, and the utilised funds less than what has been released. The study, conducted by the Civil Society Budget Advocacy Group (CSBAG) and commissioned by Publish What You Fund, also found that a lack of disaggregated data means that the support targeted at women and girls is likely to be lower than the estimates suggest.
