AT WOMENSTRONG INTERNATIONAL
we advance progress toward gender equity by partnering with grassroots urban women-led organizations dedicated to improving the lives of the girls and women they serve.
We listen to
WOMEN
who know what they need.
WomenStrong was founded to elevate the voices of women in local communities, who know what they need, in order to thrive. We start by listening to women.
We respond to
their Needs
Women know the challenges they face. They know what they need, to build better lives. WomenStrong partners listen to women and girls so they can address their most urgent priorities: for education, health, violence prevention, and economic security and opportunity.
Educating & empowering girls
AN ESTIMATED
130M
adolescent girls worldwide were out of school even before the covid pandemic.
Education is a basic building block for every girl’s future success.
The millions of out-of-school girls are at greater risk of sexual violence, child marriage, and early pregnancy, threatening their lifetime outcomes. WomenStrong partners from SAHAR Education in Afghanistan (pictured) to Women’s Justice Initiative in Guatemala empower girls, helping them gain essential advocacy and life skills. These and other partners have worked with fathers and other family members, to value girls’ education, and with teachers and schools, to disrupt harmful gender norms that imperil the future of both girls and boys.
IMPROVING WOMEN’S HEALTH
more than
800
women worldwide die each day from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth.
Women worldwide are disproportionately impacted by poor health, especially poor reproductive health.
Every two minutes, a woman dies of pregnancy or childbirth-related complications. An estimated 68,000 women die every year from unsafe abortions, and millions more are injured. A crippling impediment to meeting the health needs of urban women and girls is the lack of access to accurate reproductive health information and quality affordable care. Many WomenStrong partners, including Copper Rose Zambia, Projet Jeune Leader in Madagascar, and Roots of Health in the Philippines (pictured on previous slide), break down these barriers, getting information, services, and supplies into the hands of young women and girls, along with youth-friendly, reproductive health education to empower adolescents to engage in healthy behaviors.
Preventing Violence Against Women and Girls
GLOBALLY
1 in 3
EXPERIENCE PHYSICAL ABUSE AND/OR SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN THEIR LIFETIMES
The World Health Organization calls violence against women a global health problem of pandemic proportions.
Globally, 1 in 3 women will experience physical abuse and/or sexual violence in their lifetimes, mostly by an intimate partner. And this was before the COVID pandemic and its subsequent lockdowns, which led to skyrocketing rates of domestic violence. WomenStrong partners, including The Action Foundation in Kenya (pictured), address violence through community awareness-raising activities, programs engaging males in addressing hypermasculinity and machismo, and direct services for girls, women, and survivors.
Strengthening Economic Security and Opportunity
Women’s work caring for others, if paid, would account for up to
40% of GDP
When women can earn an income and have decision-making power over their finances, they and their children do better, their families and communities are healthier, and nations thrive.
From the beginning, WomenStrong’s founding partners focused on economic empowerment for women and girls, including through group savings and loans, small enterprises, job skills training, and financial literacy programs. Now, WomenStrong has launched a cohort of grantee partners focused on collective asset-building, through training, organizing, and advocating for women’s rights, safety, and leadership in the workplace.
We enable learning & sharing.
Grants are just the beginning. At WomenStrong, we bring women-led organizations together in a peer learning network where they can share their experiences, learn from one another what’s working and what’s not, build solidarity, and improve their programs.
Adapting to emerging realities.
During the global pandemic, WomenStrong partners proved their resilience – and so did we. COVID-19 drove us to innovate. Our partners found new ways of reaching their women and girls. And we found new ways of supporting and strengthening their work that have endured until today: we now offer unrestricted, trust-based funding, capacity strengthening to meet and evolve with our partners’ needs, convening, collaboration, and community-building in our partner-led Learning Lab, and opportunities for our partners to share their solutions broadly, among peer organizations, national governments, international agencies, and beyond!
What have we learned?
By identifying experienced partners with a shared purpose and providing them with flexible funding and tailored capacity strengthening, you can build a learning community that advances solutions to the challenges facing urban women and girls worldwide.
Looking to the
Future
WomenStrong’s Learning Lab now embraces 19 organizations in 17 nations. As we continue to grow, share, and learn, we strengthen our global community, deepening our impact on the lives of women and girls.
