One focus, multiple dividends: Why we must prioritise gender to achieve better outcomes for all

By Naina Subberwal Batra, CEO of AVPN and Olivia Leland, Founder and CEO of Co-Impact.

The just concluded B20 Summit in Bali – the business engagement of Indonesia G20 presidency – provided delegates and world leaders the opportunity to deliberate on gender and bring it to the forefront of business leaders’ and policy makers’ agendas. As participants in this forum, we know that these discussions are timely and urgent and must be met with action. We are painfully aware of what is at stake.

Women bear the brunt of war, pandemics, and climate change. Globally, women are 14 times more likely to die in climate events and four times more likely to be displaced because of climate.¹ The ongoing Russia-Ukraine war has widened gender gaps in food insecurity, malnutrition, and energy poverty, and increased gender-based violence around the world.² Not to forget the long-tail of COVID-19 which has yet to dissipate, having forced millions of women out of jobs, slashing salaries and increasing domestic work amongst numerous other consequences.

These unprecedented times have revealed deep cracks in the system that maintain, and in many cases, widen gender inequality. The World Economic Forum projects that it will take 132 years to achieve gender equality while UN Women paints an even grimmer outlook of another 300 years.³ We cannot wait three more generations for women and men, boys and girls to live in an inclusive and equitable society that grants equal rights for all without discrimination. We must act now and act decisively to close the gap in gender equality.

It is this shared belief and commitment to tackling gender injustice and improving women’s economic outcomes with urgency that motivated AVPN to launch its Asia Gender Equality Fund at the B20 summit. This launch triggered engaging conversations around the importance of integrating gender principles in philanthropy and impact investing. With Co-Impact having also launched its second fund, the Gender Fund, in March this year, our two organisations – in solidarity as collaboratives for change – celebrate both our shared vision and diversity in approach to realising a more gender equal world.

We believe that because gender inequality is a cross-cutting issue, it demands multi-pronged and conscientious approaches by an ecosystem of actors. We thus see our contributions through these funds as a small part of a larger whole of existing and needed contributions to the space – and work in solidarity with others working towards similar goals everywhere.

If we want to achieve meaningful progress in any area, we cannot leave half of the world’s population behind. Adopting inclusive solutions and collectively investing in addressing barriers to progress for women and girls is an imperative for our generation. We must collectively develop solutions, at all levels, that are responsive to the specific needs of women and girls. In doing so, we are laying the foundation for them to not only survive, but thrive, even in the face of unexpected, unavoidable disruptions like we’ve seen in this past decade alone.

The AVPN and Co-Impact gender funds, though distinct, share a common goal: to transform key systems while applying a strong gender lens that will make these systems more inclusive and equitable. The AVPN’s Asia Gender Equality Fund is a USD 25 million fund which focuses on strengthening organisations that implement and/or anchor interventions addressing the specific and urgent needs around women’s economic empowerment in Asia. By providing unrestricted funding to small and medium organisations, the fund will empower founders to define the most effective usage of funding received to improve their service delivery and improve outcomes for women and girls in Asia. Co-Impact’s Gender Fund, aims to raise US $1billion over the next ten years and direct it towards locally rooted initiatives in Africa, Asia⁴ and Latin America working to advance gender equality and to improve outcomes in health, education and economic opportunity for at least 100 million people. It also aims to advance women’s leadership at all levels, increase women’s representation in the critical domains of law and economics, shift discriminatory gender norms, and generate evidence to inform practice.

How can philanthropic leaders, funders and the broader social impact ecosystem be more intentional about securing a promising future for women and girls to benefit all humanity? Here are three key insights about what we are learning.

Invest more in evidence – and follow the data

Robust evidence is key to driving impactful interventions. Yet when it comes to gender equality, gaps in data and a pervasive lack of disaggregation by sex and other demographic characteristics point to the chronic lack of investment in this area. While there are numerous efforts to improve women’s rights, opportunities, and participation, there remains a dearth of information around what strategies work best, and how funders and those implementing interventions can develop relationships grounded in trust, honesty, and co-dependence.

Moreover, even where data on gender equality exists, funding is often slow to follow the evidence. For example, while research indicates that funding women’s economic empowerment can result in 12% economic growth, less than 2% of development funding goes into this area of work.⁵ Although women’s rights organisations play catalytic roles in driving systemic change, they remain underfunded and underrepresented, receiving less than 1% of total foundation giving.⁶ This indicates a lack of true appreciation of the value of data that reflects how certain issues impact men, women, and all gender-diverse people differently. Data production can only be as valuable as the analysis it undergoes and how it is translated into accessible outputs that can be trusted and used by policymakers, social change agents and civil society.

For both AVPN and Co-Impact Gender Funds, data underpins our approach to funds design; informing how we define outputs, outcomes and objectives. Both our gender funds also seek to contribute to the body of evidence through our own work and that of our partners by generating data and identifying gaps in existing data. AVPN’s approach focuses on fostering relationships that expand opportunities for evidence generation by convening sharing circles, creating safe spaces for funders and grantees to share learnings, challenges and expectations. Adopting trust-based philanthropy in its Asia Gender Equality Fund, AVPN uses streamlined learning and data collection to build trustworthy relationships between funders and impact organisations to address existing power imbalances between funders and grantees. This allows these organisations to focus more on creating impact instead of drowning in administrative work. Co-impact focuses on generating and sharing research and learnings to benefit partners and other social change makers, and all grants have a strong focus on learning that is partner led. The entire design of Co-Impact’s Gender Fund was based on broad consultations and evidence reviews, and the fund also provides practitioner-oriented research grants to inform and improve practice across intervention areas.

Deploy funding to where it has the most impact

What and how we fund matters. To maximise the value of invested resources, funders and philanthropic leaders should support the most impactful ideas and actors who are best placed to cultivate real change on the ground. First, interventions that adopt a systems focused rather than a single-issue approach most effectively and sustainably address the root causes of challenges faced within systems. Second, locally-rooted organisations and social change makers have the local expertise, contextual knowledge and relationships needed to make lasting changes in their communities and beyond.

Unfortunately, local and small organisations, particularly those led by women, are largely underfunded. Only 2.1% of humanitarian aid flows directly to local and national actors in the Global South and in 2018,⁷ only 1 percent of gender-focused international aid was directed to women’s rights organisations.⁸ These organisations need more funding and fewer barriers to accessing this funding, so they are able to strengthen their core capabilities and scale their impact. No individual fund or funder can address the diversity, depth, geography, and focus areas needed to ensure a just and inclusive society for all. Our gender funds are seeking to address this by bringing together funding partners, pooling funds and ensuring that partners proximal to and leading proven initiatives have access to larger and long-term funding as well as the flexibility to direct the funding to their most urgent needs whether that be operational or programmatic. It takes flexible, trust-based approaches like this to meaningfully and sustainably tackle systemic problems at scale.

Change the Game by collaborating and influencing the public and private sector’s approach

To change the game, how we do funding also needs to be catalytic and demonstrate the potential of the change we seek. Funders and philanthropic leaders have a critical role in shaping new approaches that will influence how the public and private sectors can champion gender equality. First, funders need to come together to support collaborative solutions to create needed transformation at scale. We are encouraged and excited to see a growing movement of philanthropists globally and regionally, collaborating and demonstrating inclusive and equitable giving – exemplified by AVPN and Co-Impact’s Gender Funds. Coming together to pool resources makes long-term thinking possible, it creates opportunities for resources invested to have outsized impact and address intersecting causes of inequalities.

By maintaining a systems focus, funders’ resources are better utilised and can catalyse systemic changes sustainably by building on and strengthening existing government and market mechanisms that serve millions of people rather than building parallel efforts. This would not only remarkably increase the value of every dollar investment but has also proven to have the powerful potential to attract increased financial and non-financial investments from other funders and the private sector that increases the overall pie of resources for gender transformative change in key systems.

It’s the imperative of our generation

Finally, in funding there can be nothing for women without women. Interventions seeking to advance women’s power and agency must reflect representation of women, girls and other gendered minorities, and go beyond tokenistic approaches to truly inclusive ways of integrating women’s voices and needs. Instead of merely building individual women’s capacities, for example, funding should invest in creating pathways for women to enter and thrive in leadership positions; promoting women’s leadership at a more impactful scale through changes in institutional policies and practices. To this end, philanthropists have a critical role in funding the transformation of laws, cultural norms, and institutional practices to create pathways to intersectional leadership for women collectively,

We at AVPN and Co-Impact recognize that we are living in a momentous time with immense opportunity to leave a more gender equal inheritance to the next generation. The time to collaborate and act for true gender equality is now. No single fund can address the scale of the challenge alone. We call on philanthropic leaders to adopt an abundance mindset and invest more and better in advancing gender equality to transform our systems and create a just world that benefits everyone.

AVPN is Asia’s #1 social investment network, and an ecosystem builder that works to increase the flow of capital towards impact in Asia, ensuring that resources are most effectively deployed.

Co-impact is a global philanthropic collaborative focused on improving the lives of millions of people through just and inclusive systems.

An edited version of this piece was recently published on Nikkei Asia here.

^[1] fortune.com/2022/07/25/why-climate-change-disproportionally-impacts-women

^[2] unwomen.org/en/news-stories/press-release/2022/09/press-release-new-un-policy-paper-shows-the-devasting-impacts-of-the-ukraine-war-on-women-and-girls

^[3] unwomen.org/en/news-stories/speech/2022/09/speech-taking-stronger-action-to-keep-the-promises-of-generation-equality

^[4] For Asia, Co-Impact’s is funding initiatives in India, Indonesia and Sri Lanka

^[5] oecd.org/development/gender-development/How-does-aid-support-womens-economic-empowerment-2021.pdf

^[6] bridgespan.org/bridgespan/Images/articles/philanthropy-and-feminist-movements/full-report-philanthropy-and-feminist-movements.pdf

^[7] devinit.org/resources/global-humanitarian-assistance-report-2020/funding-effectiveness-and-efficiency

^[8] bridgespan.org/bridgespan/Images/articles/philanthropy-and-feminist-movements/full-report-philanthropy-and-feminist-movements.pdf