About Co-Impact
Launched in 2017, Co-Impact is a global philanthropic collaborative for just and inclusive systems change. We fund partners to transform health, education, and economic systems in order to achieve equitable and inclusive impact at scale in countries across the Global South.
Co-Impact brings together a global group of funding partners committed to enabling meaningful systems change for millions of people. Funders join the collaborative in order to pool or align their resources, networks, and experience, creating significant leverage for their effort and resources. Together, our funding partners support powerful, locally-rooted coalitions to build robust and resilient societies for the long term.
Gender Fund: the story so far
Co-Impact’s first fund, Foundational Fund, establishes and advances a model of collaborative philanthropy, bringing together funders to support systems change in the foundational sectors of health, education, and economic opportunity. We expect to announce our second fund, the Gender Fund, at the Generation Equality Forum in June and launch it at the end of 2021.
The Gender Fund is focused on transformative systems change, with an emphasis on elevating women and girls’ power, agency, and leadership at all levels. Gender discrimination is entrenched into systems in every country around the world and is exacerbated when it intersects with other forms of oppression based on race, class, disability, caste, or sexual identity, among others. We know that to transform systems, we need to understand power – who has it, and who is excluded. We also know that this understanding won’t be possible without focusing on gender dynamics and taking an intersectional lens to systems change.
The Gender Fund builds on three years of learning and evidence-gathering from our existing work. We have consulted with our program partners, advisors, and advocates from within communities and movements, and global experts and activists. We have continually used these inputs to evolve and strengthen our core concepts to ensure they reflect the interests of the communities we seek to serve. From there, we began an extensive process of listening and learning, focusing particularly on perspectives from the Global South. Alongside this process, we have commissioned a series of evidence reviews that are both informing our approach and helping us identify areas for research and investment.
Listening and Learning
One core part of these consultations was a series of structured discussions with more than 50 leaders on the purpose, design, and structure of the Gender Fund. This report presents an overview of what we heard during this structured consultation process. It summarizes the key themes that emerged from our conversations and outlines how our thinking has evolved.
