Over the next four years the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will steer $170 million to increase women’s economic might across the world, delivering on Melinda Gates’s longstanding goal to place a greater emphasis on women’s equality.
Under its new gender-equality strategy, Gates will primarily support research, community organizing, and policy development in India, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. The money will go to create self-help groups where women can find support and amplify their collective voice, connect women with market opportunities for their products and services, study land ownership and inheritance patterns in the developing world, and push to give women greater access to digital financial services.
“At the core of every problem we’re trying to solve ... women and girls stand at the center of the solution,” said Sarah Hendriks, who will lead the effort. “We can’t achieve our goals as a foundation if half the population is left behind and their potential and talent go untapped.”
Long Track Record
Since it was created in 2000, the Gates Foundation has supported efforts to improve women’s lives, with a particular focus on maternal health, nutrition, and contraception.
Over the past several years, Melinda Gates has pushed for the nation’s biggest grant maker, with $41.3 billion in assets, to develop a more explicit and broader strategy that includes economic inclusion.
In the annual letter that Bill and Melinda Gates released last month, she said that in the foundation’s early days, her husband, whose years at Microsoft helped make him a vocal leader, was the public face of the foundation.
While the couple always made decisions together, she said, achieving gender equality has been a personal mission of hers.
“Gradually, I’ve focused more and more on gender issues, because I’ve seen repeatedly that the more empowered women and girls are, the stronger their communities are,” she wrote.
Melinda Gates has pursued that goal in her own investments through her executive office, Pivotal Ventures, which has placed bets on women-led venture-capital firms and supported research on gender disparities in the work force, according to reports.
At the foundation, Gates in 2016 announced an $80 million commitment to gaps in data on women. Of that, $20 million was promised to women’s advocacy groups that could use the data to push for change.
At the Women Deliver conference in Copenhagen that year, Gates explained why she feels the focus on women and girls is so important.
“Supporting women and girls to reach their full potential unleashes the world’s most powerful force for economic and social progress for all,” she said. “It will do more than anything else to ensure equality, secure universal rights, and advance human history.”
$12 Trillion Boost
Women have long been paid less than men in formal work settings and contribute the majority of unpaid, informal work. In its announcement of the new strategy, the Gates Foundation cited a 2015 study by McKinsey & Company that predicted that advancements in women’s equality could boost the global economy by $12 trillion by 2025.
Perhaps that’s why foundation support of women’s economic equality “is so trendy right now,” said Karen Sugar, executive director of the Women’s Global Empowerment Fund, a Colorado nonprofit that provides microfinance services for women in Uganda.
“It’s good economics as well as being socially conscious,” she said.
She pointed to a “robust infrastructure” of foundation support in addition to Gates, from grant makers that include the Ford, Hewlett, Open Society, and United Nations foundations.
Enthusiastic Partners
Gates selected India, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda because the foundation is already working on projects in each of them and can build on those efforts. They were also chosen because they have governments that are inclined to serve as stable, enthusiastic partners.
“We were looking for countries with the potential for long-term engagement,” said Hendriks.
The foundation declined to name any initial grantees.
Some of the grant maker’s funding will go toward research. For instance, by assessing land ownership patterns, the foundation hopes to figure out ways to increase property ownership among women, which could diversify their income and provide them with more input on land use.
Other grants will attempt to put money directly into women’s hands. The foundation will push governments to transfer benefits, such as welfare payments, into digital bank accounts held by women.
When payments are directed to women, rather than a male head of household, husbands tend to think of their wives as economic partners rather than housewives. Giving women their own accounts, Hendriks said, will go a long way toward widespread inclusion of women in the formal economy.
“They will be more empowered to make their own decisions about saving and spending,” she said. “They will be more empowered to take financial risks or define their financial future.”
