Celebrating a Decade of Advancing Gender Equity
Since 2014, WomenStrong International has partnered with grassroots women-led organizations dedicated to improving the lives of the girls and women they serve.
We work in solidarity with our partners around the world who are enabling the girls and women in their communities to live healthy, fulfilled, and empowered lives.
A just and inclusive world where all women and girls are free to prosper and to live their lives in dignity and peace.
Amplifying the collective power of women to create meaningful change.
Local women leaders are best equipped and positioned to serve their communities.
WomenStrong was born out of this observation while leading Columbia University’s Millennium Cities Initiative, a project designed to help 11 sub-Saharan cities achieve the Millennium Development Goals.
“Over 10 years working across the sub-Saharan region, we repeatedly saw the rich world and public officials fail to deliver on their promises to eradicate extreme poverty. Despite this failure, local women leaders always knew what their communities needed in order to thrive; they simply lacked the technical and financial resources to realize their solutions.”
Founder & Executive Director of WomenStrong International
These women and their organizations became our source of knowledge of what works.
They knew what it would take to obtain the health care they needed, see their daughters succeed in school, earn a decent living, and live free of violence. The problem: the lack of technical and financial resources to put their solutions into practice.
Our mission is to move power and money into the hands of women-led organizations that know best what their communities need.
We co-created WomenStrong International in 2014 with our Ghanaian and Kenyan leaders. Shortly after, we expanded for proof of concept to organizations in India, Haiti, and Washington, DC. Since our founding, we’ve partnered with 27 local women-led non-profits in 24 countries around the world, and are recognized internationally as a replicable model for gender-transformative development.
We listen to women who know what they need.
We provide trust-based funding, tailored capacity strengthening, and a peer learning community for our partners, who are addressing some of the most critical needs of women and girls: for education, health care, preventing violence, and creating pathways to economic security.
Strong women are stronger together.
WomenStrong is unique in prioritizing the widespread sharing of our partners’ solutions, knowledge, and experiences. We do so across geographies, so that the most effective strategies can be replicated, adapted, and scaled in similar communities and contexts across the globe.
What Guides Our Work
Our Values
Our commitment to equity
Our Partners
See who we work with
