Challenges
Women own only 1 percent of the world’s assets yet comprise 70 percent of the world’s 1.7 billion people living in poverty.
Claudia Julieht Córdoba Pérez, a carpenter, Asociación de Mujeres Constructoras de Condega
Although women now have higher rates of literacy and life expectancy, poverty among women still rages in most parts of the world due to entrenched traditions, neoliberal economic policies, and wars. Women are also now faced with unforeseen challenges caused by climate change and natural disasters, such as greater difficulty accessing water and food. Rural women in developing countries today spend up to eight hours a day collecting and carrying over two gallons of water.
Our Accomplishments
Over 24 years, the Global Fund for Women has
- Supported the advocacy efforts and collaborations among worker’s rights organizations around the world who together won the passage of the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) Convention on domestic work in June of 2011, extending basic labor protections to millions of women employed in other people’s homes.
- Supported advocacy efforts of hundreds of organizations to enable women to gain access to land rights and credit, and to stem the feminization of poverty globally.
Grantees
- Pesticide Action Network Asia-Pacific, Malaysia
- Women at Work, Serbia
View all GFW grants supporting economic and environmental justice »
Vision
GFW envisions a world where everyone has the fundamental right to food, economic security, clean air and water, natural resources necessary for survival, and a life of dignity. We support women-led efforts to build a world in which economic development is promoted in an ecologically sustainable manner and equitably distributed across genders.
Our Grantmaking
GFW supports grantees engaged in cutting-edge work to bring a feminist perspective to issues of economic and environmental justice. As a human rights funder, we are committed to addressing systems and structures that impede women’s economic rights and exploit the earth’s natural resources. The continued degradation of the environment threatens not only millions of other species on the planet but humanity itself. GFW supports grantees working to preserve biodiversity, conserve energy, water, and natural resources and ensure women's representation in global negotiations.
Our grantees work to Ensure Economic Justice in the following ways »
Promote Just Business and Commerce
- Address local and national policies around fair business and commerce practices, and just management of natural resources.
- Support women’s cooperatives in business development, processing and quality control skills, and marketing.
Economic Literacy
- Provide training and education on the ABCs of economic management and relations.
- Build marketing and skills related to income-generating and small business projects, such as food processing, managing small budgets, and animal husbandry.
Income Generating Projects
- Seed money (grants or microcredit loans) for small-scale production to create income-generating projects, promoting inclusion of vulnerable populations, such as women with disabilities.
Labor and Worker Rights
- Address the rights of women workers in the formal and informal sector, including migrant, domestic and sex workers.
- Advocate for worker rights, safe workplaces and fair wages.
Trade and Globalization
- Engage nationally and internationally to transform harmful and exploitative trade agreements and economic globalization patterns.
- Advocate for fair labor and fair trade practices.
- Mobilize movements to advocate for debt cancellation.
Stop Trafficking and Economic Exploitation of Women and Girls
- Advocate stronger persecution of trafficking rings.
- Support awareness raising of traps of false advertisements for international jobs in poor communities.
- Create local job opportunities and training in countries and communities with high risk of trafficking.
Housing Rights
- Advance human right to housing, particularly for widows, divorcees, single women, and women heads of households.
Inheritance and Land Rights
- Support women’s right to own, rent, and inherit land.
- Advocate for reform of inheritance and property laws.
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Our grantees work to Ensure Environmental Justice through »
Sustainable Agriculture
- Promotes self-sufficiency livelihoods, environmental protection, long-term sustainability regardless of market changes, improved farming methods, and food security practices.
Natural Resources Rights/Access
- Ensures the right to self-determination, access and ownership of resources by one’s own people, collective land rights.
- Protects indigenous communities whose resources are being stolen or polluted by corporations and governments.
Preventing Environmental Degradation
- Working to prevent deforestation, flooding, global warming, and environmental deterioration affecting eco-systems and subsistence.
Environmental Rights
- To remedy inequitable environmental burden borne by disenfranchised groups, such as women of racial minority groups, outcasts, poor and indigenous communities by engaging in a holistic analysis and challenging power structures.
- Advocate for policy reforms, green jobs, and environmental reforms that benefit and are not at the expense of women, especially those most marginalized.
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