WAGE Research

WAGE Women and Girls Empowered Overview

WAGE's first strategic initiative focuses on women's economic empowerment in El Salvador and Honduras. Together with Kiva, an online loan platform that connects lenders to indigent entrepreneurs across the globe to alleviate poverty, WAGE provides financial support to women entrepreneurs and works with local microfinance institutions (MFIs) and CSOs to reduce barriers that women face in starting and growing sustainable businesses.

WAGE Ghana Gender and Inclusion Analysis

Women in Northern Ghana face not only limited access to financial services and business training to start and grow businesses, but also limited access to GBV referral pathways and support information. Female DFS agents can potentially play a role in bringing these often disconnected needs together in an integrated approach for the benefit of women entrepreneurs and others in their communities. The “Women Entrepreneurs in Northern Ghana Gain Access to Integrated services via Agent Networks” or WE GAIN initiative is designed to do specifically that.

WAGE Timor-Leste: Preliminary Gender and Inclusion Analysis

Building on strategies and best practices of its local partners, and the existing policies and programs of the government and other stakeholders, the Business and Social Support for Female Entrepreneurs in Timor-Leste (BEST) program seeks to create linkages to address the barriers faced by female microentrepreneurs in starting, maintaining, and expanding businesses.

Dismantling Bias: Lessons Learned from Grameen Foundation’s Gender and Power Dynamics Workshops within Women and Girls Empowered (WAGE) Initiatives

To address and safeguard women from the harmful norms that limit women’s economic engagement in society and that can result in gender-based violence (GBV), Grameen Foundation USA (Grameen) conducts a participatory and experiential-learning methodology, known as the Gender and Power Dynamics (GPD) workshop. The workshop is implemented with local partners as a starting point for addressing gender, equity, and diversity within integrated women’s economic empowerment (WEE) programming.

Between, 2020 and 2022, under the WAGE Global Consortium, Grameen provided GPD workshops in Honduras, El Salvador, Ghana, Eswatini, and Timor-Leste to key managerial, technical, and administrative staff of 24 partner organizations (Microfinance Institutions and Non-governmental Organizations) and in some cases other local stakeholders.