Women's Empowerment Fund

The Women’s Empowerment Fund (WEF) is designed to scale effective business models for empowering women energy entrepreneurs. WEF grantees demonstrate that there is a positive impact on business performance and social impact when women are engaged in the value chain.

Overview

The WEF is a grant facility that provides funding and capacity building to enterprises to increase the participation of women in businesses in order to scale women’s inclusion through the clean and efficient cookstoves and fuels value chain. The WEF seeks to scale the number of women energy entrepreneurs throughout the value chain and test innovative empowerment approaches in order to share lessons learned and build the evidence for effective, gender-informed business models. In the past, the WEF has supported organizations in Guatemala, Haiti, India, Kenya, Myanmar, Nigeria, Uganda, Vietnam, and Ghana. Target projects supported by WEF work to:

1. Scale women’s energy entrepreneurship and employment throughout their business models and the sector. This includes scaling existing proven gender and empowerment approaches or adding women’s income-generating opportunities into existing business models; and 
2. Pilot innovative interventions for women’s empowerment in the clean cooking sector. Grantees have tested game-changing innovations that were not previously tried in the clean cooking sector and/or strategies that have not been used by mainstream cookstoves and fuels enterprises.

The framework of each WEF project is strongly grounded in the Alliance’s Resource Guide on Scaling Adoption of Clean Cooking Solutions’ through Women’s Empowerment. WEF grantees build from the best practices for engaging women in the value chain and conduct robust monitoring and evaluation to determine the social and economic impacts of their programs using the Alliance’s Social Impact Measurement System.

For more information on the fourth Annual Women's Empowerment Fund 2017 click here.

WEF Impact

Under WEF, we have been able to access new resources, experiences, and global networks. Women’s empowerment through clean energy & entrepreneurship has become a strategic focus for CARE International in Vietnam. -Ms. Le Kim Dung, Country Director, CARE International in Vietnam

The WEF unlocked last mile distribution barriers for BURN, enabling us to invest in consumer financing and women’s entrepreneurship training. Through affordable financing, customers cut fuel costs in half, creating significant personal savings in addition to improved health. -Boston Nyer, Co-Founder, Burn Manufacturing

The WEF enabled Burro to interact with stakeholders and women entrepreneurs of gari processing communities in Ghana. This led to the creation of the Gari Elephant, a product that satisfies the needs of these entrepreneurs. -Eva Nartey, Sales Associate, Burro Brand Ghana

Gender barriers do exist. With the support from the WEF’s team we can now train our employees on how to identify and mitigate them. This is crucial to scale our women-led network marketing in rural areas. -Rocío Pérez Ochoa, Co-Founder, Bidhaa Sasa

Under the WEF, Green Generation has not only expanded our cookstove agent network in remote areas, but also leveraged the Alliance’s valuable technology and market knowledge about clean cookstoves to adopt into the Vietnam market. -Nguyen Tuan Anh, CEO, Green Generation

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