Five Leading Organizations,
One Shared Mission

Background
Women’s empowerment has long been a focus of major development institutions, such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development have identified gender equality and women’s empowerment among its top six priorities for promoting and sustaining human well-being. In the broadest sense, women’s empowerment is understood through the expansion of women’s freedom of choice and action through increased control over resources and agency in decisions to shape their own lives. As a means to many ends, women’s empowerment is considered to be of instrumental importance given its significant and positive contribution to a wider range of development outcomes, including human capital attainment (health and education), self-efficacy, political and legal participation, and poverty reduction, among others. However, in spite of the central role that women’s empowerment plays in the global agenda, the international development community has continued to struggle with operationalizing, measuring, and evaluating the concept.
While women and girls have made considerable social, political, and economic advances in recent decades, progress has been slow, and women continue to remain marginalized in their homes and communities. Current global estimates find that 15 million primary school-aged girls are out of school compared to 10 million boys. Women only hold one out of every four parliamentary seats, and only 52 percent of women who are married or in a union make their own choices over contraceptive use and health care. With less access to property, economic markets, education, health care, credit, and other assets, women are more likely to be dependent on public sector support to meet their needs and are less resilient to adverse shocks, including climate change, putting both them and their families at greater risk of poverty and insecurity.
Impact
The POWER Consortium will seek to produce a sum of overall outputs that is greater than the individual efforts made by each organization in the absence of collective coordination. The consortium offers the opportunity for partner organizations to increase collaboration, exchange expertise, unify advocacy efforts, and increase overall service delivery and accountability on project outputs.
Goal
The goal of the POWER Consortium is to facilitate collaborative partnerships across multiple institutions that work on a range of issues related to women’s empowerment and well-being in selected countries. Addressing key challenges in women’s empowerment requires multisectoral approaches and engagements that are costly to facilitate within a single institution or organization.
Specific Objectives
1
Bring together academic institutions, NGOs, government stakeholders and private sector players working on/interested in women’s issues to co-establish priorities, co-create, collaborate, and learn from each other.
2
Create a cross-sectoral convening space for all relevant stakeholders to meet and discuss barriers to empowerment and possible coordinated solutions.
3
Conduct policy-oriented (contextually appropriate) research which will be used in decision-making.
4
Identify and/or create infrastructure for incorporating research outputs into decision-making after a project is concluded