May 28th 2020 – WISE IS SO PROUD TO BE ONE OF EIGHT WINNERS under the Advancing Women’s Empowerment Fund (AWEF), out of more than 180 applicants across the globe.
Overview
At the 2019 ANDE Annual Conference, ANDE announced an exciting new partnership with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), under the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP) initiative, and the Visa Foundation to launch the ANDE Gender Equality Initiative, which aims to support women entrepreneurs in emerging markets.
The initiative’s first activity, the Advancing Women’s Empowerment Fund, will identify the best strategies to get investment capital into the hands of women entrepreneurs in emerging markets. The fund will distribute $1.2 million in funding over two years through one-year grants of up to $150,000 to entrepreneurial support organizations.
ANDE seeks proposals to pilot, test, or expand scalable solutions that tackle the financing gap for women-led SGBs in South and Southeast Asia to create learnings and insights for uptake by the broader SGB sector. ANDE intends to support a minimum of eight proposals for this round, from a total funding pool of $1.2 million. Submissions should be for activities of up to 12 months with a maximum total request of US $150,000.Current grantees (announced May 2020)
Eight organizations have been selected to receive funds under the first round of AWEF. The proposed projects span the region, covering Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, and Vietnam.
- BoP Innovation Center and One to Watch, to develop a new acceleration booster to increase the number of investment-ready female-led SGBs in Myanmar;
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) D-Lab, to identify a new pipeline of female SGB founders to participate in a co-created accelerator program to tackle the investment gap from the bottom up in India;
- Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship and CaterpillHERS, to provide an online business curriculum, training, and mentorship to build the investment readiness of women-led enterprises across five cities in Pakistan;
- SHE Investments, to create a pipeline of investment-ready women-led enterprises in Cambodia and provide access to the resources and support they need to scale;
- Value for Women, to strengthen access to finance and business development services for women-led businesses and gender-inclusive social enterprises in Myanmar, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam;
- Village Capital, to test the impact of revenue-based financing on fundraising outcomes for women-led SGBs in India;
- Villgro Philippines, to create an accelerator program to provide high-potential women-led or -owned SGBs in the Philippines access to working capital, capacity building, mentorship, and investor matching; and
- Women’s Initiative for Startups and Entrepreneurship (WISE), to address the gap in seed and early-stage funding for women-led businesses in Vietnam by increasing market opportunities in the angel investing ecosystem.
The Advancing Women’s Empowerment Fund is supported by:
Source: https://www.andeglobal.org/page/awef
For further information, please visit: https://www.aspeninstitute.org/news/press-release/ande-awef-winner-announcement/
