The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation announced this week that it will restructure its strategy for women’s economic empowerment in a way that will better support grantees and groups working on the ground, as well as bring more attention to the need for “improved gender-responsive macro-level economic policy” in East and West Africa.
Report finds rampant abuse of women in African parliaments
A new study finds that 80% of female parliamentarians surveyed had "experienced psychological violence" and 67% had been “subject to sexist behaviour or remarks.”
The foundation launched its women’s economic empowerment strategy in 2015 with the goal of providing grants to “develop critical policymaking inputs” — namely, gender-disaggregated data, improved macroeconomic research, and advocacy to raise visibility of gender differences. It announced in 2020 that it would “refresh” the initiative as part of a review process conducted for each of its grant-making strategies every few years.
“This process allows us to ask what has worked, what we have learned, and how we can adapt to a changing world,” the foundation said in 2020.
This week, the foundation said information used to help shape gender-based economic policy — such as gender-disaggregated data — had improved since it launched the initiative. But it also said the review process, which included grantee interviews, showed that macroeconomic policies were still being designed and implemented in a way that disadvantaged women. These policies are typically part of broader government economic plans for growth and stabilization.
In response to these new findings, the Hewlett Foundation said that it would shift the strategic focus to the pursuit of four main outcomes:
• Attracting more funders with an interest in supporting relevant policy changes at the macro level in East and West Africa.
• Amplifying the work of research institutions and think tanks in East and West Africa that might provide the basis for macroeconomic policies in areas such as “unpaid care, informal work, social protection, and tax justice,” among others.
• Providing more support to African women’s economic empowerment advocates, women’s rights organizations, and feminist movements, and doing so “in a learning mode.”
• Working with a “select group” of international financial institutions, as well as multilateral and bilateral agencies, to help them better understand the need for investment in “gender-responsive approaches to macro-level economic policy.”
“As our goal is to promote gender-responsive macro-level economic policy in East and West Africa, we will aim to shift priority-setting and decision-making power from global actors to local, national, and regional actors in Africa,” the foundation said. “They are closer to both the problems and the aspirations of the women we seek to serve.”
The California-based Hewlett Foundation — which focuses on a range of issues, such as education and the environment, and has an endowment of more than $10 billion — has a program dedicated to gender equity and governance.
Grantees under that program include Global Fund for Women, which received $2.1 million in November to support “feminist-led abortion rights movements in Francophone West Africa.” The foundation also provided a $2 million grant to the World Bank that month as part of a joint effort with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation to help drive more investments in child care.
About the author
Stephanie Beasley@Steph_Beasley
Stephanie Beasley is a Senior Reporter at Devex, where she covers global philanthropy with a focus on regulations and policy. She is an alumna of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and Oberlin College and has a background in Latin American studies. She previously covered transportation security at POLITICO.
