Women's Economic Empowerment
Working Group Newsletter
March 2021
This International Women's Month, we would like to express our gratitude to each one of you for striving to empower women through your work every day. As always, we bring you the resources, tools and a space for collaborative and impactful learning with your fellow working group members. Stay connected on Twitter, where we're sharing what many global development practitioners are choosing to challenge to achieve gender equality.
2021 Steering Committee & Technical Priorities
We’re delighted to welcome new members to the Working Group Steering Committee, and new facilitator Uloma Ogba, Senior Specialist for Gender and Financial Inclusion at MarketShare Associates! These distinguished individuals join a dedicated team of gender experts to tackle seven technical priorities for 2021:
  • COVID-19 & WEE
  • Women's Agency
  • Male Inclusion
  • Climate & Resilience
  • WEE & Business Environment
  • Intersectionality
  • Addressing Unintended Consequences in WEE
New Resource Compendium on Intersectionality
It's no secret that women around the world are disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. They are losing their jobs at higher rates than men, experiencing increased care burdens and domestic violence, and struggling to keep businesses afloat. Further, the overlay of other identities including race, disability, sexual orientation, age, socio-economic status, geography, migration status and other pre-existing structural inequalities and conditions intensifies the impact of COVID-19.

Here's how Aapta and Sherry think our new Resource Compendium can help inform your programming for an intersectional response:
"The launch of the Resource Compendium offers us an exciting and necessary guide on how to better ensure that programming is responsive to the needs and nuances of different populations, including the most marginalized. It is a valuable resource for all stakeholders and for the SEEP network and I encourage all to make use of this in-depth Compendium to improve COVID-19 response."

Aapta Garg
Senior Program Officer
Promundo
“[This new] Intersectionality Compendium unpacks some of the most critical, and often difficult, questions that need to be asked when designing international COVID-19 response programming. The time has come for international development experts to dig deep into both understanding the nuanced requirements of those that are most severely affected by COVID-19 and more importantly providing responses that are customized to their specific needs.This Compendium lays the groundwork and provides an initial roadmap to inform and direct higher impact intersectional COVID-19 response efforts.”

Sherry Youssef Younes
Director of Work
FHI 360
Announcing Recipients of a Gender Intentional Savings Groups Innovation Fund
After an extensive review phase of nearly 300 proposals received for the Women Saving for Resilience Innovation Fund, we are thrilled to announce that the grants have been awarded to DreamStart Labs, ElleSolaire, Global Communities, World Renew, and the Zoological Society of London.

The awards will support innovative COVID-19 response and recovery efforts related to Savings Groups, in the areas of women’s livelihoods, voice and leadership, violence against women, digital Savings Groups, crisis and emergency risk communications, access to finance, and clean energy.
Upcoming Webinar
April 13 | Webinar | Evidence Consortium on Women’s Groups
New Blog
Using Artificial Intelligence and Technology for Women's Economic Empowerment: How Can It Work? by Caroline Rubin, Julia Hakspiel and Bobbi Gray (WEE WG) with Alexa Roscoe and Lana Graf at IFC
Share your work in WEE! We invite you to submit tools, resources, case studies and more to be featured in the Women’s Economic Empowerment Resource Library!

Warm regards,
The SEEP Network WEE Working Group