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.
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.
Our new study, conducted by Omar Asghar Khan Foundation and commissioned by Publish What You Fund, tracked funding for women’s economic empowerment in Pakistan. It identified 1,674 projects supported by the federal and provincial governments. These had a combined expenditure of Rs.132 billion.
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.
