The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will give $20 million during the next three years to strengthen women’s groups worldwide, Ms. Gates said Wednesday during an event in New York.
While details are still forthcoming, the foundation said the money will support research, training, and groups of other donors already active in the field. It will also be used to bolster grass-roots women’s campaigns in the developing world.
While the money is a tiny slice of the foundation’s more than $40 billion in assets, it represents a shift. In the past, Gates has not focused its grant making on strengthening grass-roots organizations. Instead, it has made science the cornerstone of its international development work, collecting data on things like vaccines and agricultural techniques to accomplish gains in global health and other areas.
Ms. Gates made the announcement at an event put on by the foundation to promote the United Nations’ sustainable-development goals, a set of global development targets the international body wants to accomplish by 2030. The U.N. goals include achieving gender equality for women through access to education, health care, and work, among other means.
Directing support to women’s activist groups can be more effective than supporting governments or large international aid organizations, Ms. Gates told Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during an event the foundation held on Wednesday.
“They know their community,” she said. “They know what needs to get done.”
The $20 million is part of an $80 million commitment that Ms. Gates first announced in May 2016 to collect data on social issues that women and girls face and advance gender equality worldwide. Until now, the foundation had not provided any information on how the money would be used.
Gender Equality
Ms. Gates has emerged as a vocal champion of gender equality in recent years. She is leading an effort to bring more women into technology jobs. In the Gateses’ annual letter this year she reiterated a commitment to providing birth control to hundreds of millions of women in the developing world, calling the use of contraceptives “one of the greatest anti-poverty innovations in history.”
Most of Gates’s international grants historically have gone toward achieving specific development goals, according to Joshua Lozman, director of global program advocacy at the foundation. For instance, the grant maker has spent billions of dollars to provide vaccinations and improve maternal health.
The current funding, he said, is different. The desired outcome isn’t higher vaccination rates or fewer maternal deaths, although those could result from a stronger women’s movement. Instead, the effort aims to strengthen the networks and the leadership of organizations laboring to advance gender equality.
Strengthen Data
Among the organizations slated to receive the money is Mama Cash, a Dutch women’s funding network that will get $4.5 million over three years. Other grantees include Change.org and the Prospera Network, but Mr. Lozman declined to provide details on how much money they would receive. In addition, Gates will provide grants to unspecified campaigns centered on women’s issues in the developing world, he said.
Some of the $20 million will go to academic research on the effectiveness of social movements in improving the lives of women worldwide.
“It’s not an enormous set of grants in the scheme of our funding, but our hope is that by coupling it with this research, it will strengthen the data we have to make the case for doing more of this,” he added.
Movement building represents a big change from Gates’s normal practice, said Chung-Wha Hong, executive director of Grassroots International. Speaking without knowledge of the Gates announcement, she said Gates and other foundations often have a “top-down” approach that does not fully take the experience of community members into account.
“Grass-roots groups have a lot of legitimate skepticism about large funders like Gates,” she said.
Rajasvini Bhansali, executive director of Thousand Currents, which funds climate-change, anti-poverty, and equality efforts in the developing world said that if large grant makers like Gates that value data evaluation get involved in movement funding, they will find evidence of the positive effect of social movements. Grass-roots campaigns, she said, are effective to the extent that they recognize and use the built-in knowledge and data that exist in communities.
“They can’t do it on hearsay and charisma alone,” she said.
