Five Leading Organizations,
One Shared Mission
About Us
The Africa POWER Consortium brings together five research and policy organizations working to advance women’s empowerment, gender equity, and human well-being across Sub-Saharan Africa. The Consortium is administered by the Program on Women’s Empowerment Research (POWER), housed within the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health (“PopFam”) at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, which serves as the Consortium’s Secretariat.
Addressing the key challenges facing women’s empowerment in Sub-Saharan Africa requires multisectoral approaches that are costly - and often impossible - for any single institution to mount alone. The Africa POWER Consortium exists to make that kind of collaboration possible: to bring together academic institutions, NGOs, government partners, and private-sector organizations to co-create research priorities, share expertise, and translate evidence into policy that improves women’s lives.
Our Mission
Governance
Our History
The mission of the Africa POWER Consortium is to advance women’s empowerment through collaborative, transformative, demand-driven, and policy-relevant research with an engaged community of practitioners and partners.
The Africa POWER Consortium grew out of the Program on Women’s Empowerment Research(POWER). Since the Consortium’s founding in 2023, we have held three annual retreats - in Salima,Malawi (2024); Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (2025); and Nairobi, Kenya (2026) - to build our sharedstrategy, identify collaborative seed projects, and grow our partnership. Our work is supported bythe William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
The Consortium is overseen by an Executive Committee with one representative from each partner institution, chaired by a representative from the Secretariat. The Committee meets monthly and convenes in person at least once a year - most visibly at our annual Consortium retreat - to set strategy, review project progress, and make decisions on seed funding. A dedicated Secretariat team supports day-to-day coordination, financial management, communications, and research across the partnership.
Specific Objectives
1
Bring together diverse institutions - academic, governmental, non-profit, and private-sector - to co-establish research priorities, collaborate on projects, and learn from one another, formalizing these relationships into local hubs in the countries where we work.
2
Conduct policy-oriented research that gets used. In practice, this means engaging policymakers and other stakeholders throughout the research process - from co-identifying research priorities with government champions, to presenting early results for feedback, to providing technical assistance (data analysis, impact evaluation, quality assurance) directly to our partners.
3
Build lasting infrastructure for research-to-policy translation - including flexible seed funding for promising new projects, a public repository for Consortium outputs, and a growing network of partners and champions across the region.