Women Deliver Conference: Sustainable Solutions for Gender Equality.

Image: GIF team alongside gender equality portfolio grantees and co-funders at the 2023 Women Deliver Conference.

As one of the largest multi-sectoral convenings to advance gender equality, this year’s Women Deliver Conference, held from 17-20 July in Kigali, Rwanda, created inclusive spaces for discussions on sustainable solutions for gender equality. As part of the conference, our team was delighted to have the opportunity to celebrate the successes of GIF’s Innovating for Gender Equality sub-fund to date.

GIF’s Innovating for Gender Equality Fund invests in innovations that increase the agency of women and girls. Innovations in the Fund work towards greater participation by women in decision making, prevention of violence against women and girls, and greater control over assets. The Fund fills a gap in the global landscape at the intersections of gender equality, innovation and impact-first financing, and is already expected to benefit more than 25 million women and girls in the next ten years.

Our delegation at the conference was thrilled to host representatives from several GIF gender equality portfolio grantees, alongside co-investors, at a fringe event to celebrate the successes of our work together to date. Attendees included representatives from Educate! and Impact(Ed) International, both of whom utilise innovative education solutions to advance gender equality in the developing world.

Also represented were RWAMREC, one of GIF’s most recent grantees. Their innovation, Bandebereho, engages young men and their partners on positive fatherhood, as well as maternal, newborn and childhood health. We were also delighted to collaborate with RWAMREC to host a donor roundtable at the conference, where we discussed the importance of investing in scalable gender transformative programmes.

The theme of Women Deliver Conference 2023 was ‘Spaces, Solidarity, and Solutions’. With the rapid growth of our innovating for gender equality portfolio, as well as the implementation of the GIF Gender Equality Framework, this theme is embraced at the very core of our philosophy. We also make space for considerations of gender equality in each and every one of our investments - even those not directly aiming for gender equality outcomes - by using our Gender Marker. This tool enables us to assess the gender dimensions of any potential investment.

The core of GIF’s mission is to invest in the most impactful solutions to development challenges, based on close analysis of projected impact on target beneficiaries. We will therefore continue to find and fund innovations that can shift the harmful social structures and norms that perpetuate gender inequality in the developing world, enabling sustainable solutions for gender equality.