Grants Available to Boost Women’s Empowerment and Clean Cooking
The Alliance announces the launch of the third annual Women’s Empowerment Fund (WEF), a financing mechanism designed to scale effective business models for empowerment through women’s energy entrepreneurship. The WEF is a global fund for Alliance partners to increase the number of women earning income in the cooking value chain and to test innovative approaches to scaling women’s empowerment throughout the clean cooking sector. In the past, the WEF has supported organizations in Guatemala, Haiti, India, Kenya, Myanmar, Nigeria, and Uganda. You can learn more about current WEF grantees here.
With the support of the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) and the U.S. Department of State, the WEF will award grants of up to US$75,000 to at least 4 qualifying organizations. The selected WEF projects will have a 12-month timeframe to meet concrete objectives and performance milestones. The funding enables grantees to test innovative approaches that empower women and address gender issues that can later be scaled if proven effective.
On March 1, 2016, the WEF competition will open for applications. The application process will take place in two phases:
- Phase One:
- Open to all Alliance partners.
- Applicants will submit a 5 page executive summary / Expression of Interest (EOI) that provides an overview of their business model and the proposed intervention or innovation, including a timeline of project milestones and a budget outlining key cost categories and cost share.
- The EOI deadline is March 21, 2016 at 9:00AM EST/1:00PM GMT.
- Alliance will select finalists to submit a full proposal.
- Phase Two:
- Applicants selected to submit a full proposal in Phase 2 will receive a request on or around April 15, 2016.
- Finalists will be asked to submit a proposal, including (but not limited to) a more detailed project plan, detailed budget, financial statements, and performance indicators.
- Winners will be notified no later than July 15, 2016.
WEF grantees are required to align their impact indicators with the Alliance’s Social Impact M&E Framework, which was developed in collaboration with the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW). Applicants should familiarize themselves with the draft framework and indicators, and determine a set of key indicators they would like to measure in their WEF projects. Applicants are not be required to measure all indicators, but should follow the guidance provided and select several indicators that are relevant to their business models and WEF intervention. For more information on the Social Impact M&E Framework, please refer to the Alliance’s website. You may also contact Rachel Mahmud (rmahmud@cleancookstoves.org) with any questions about the M&E framework.
Applicants must be a registered partner of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves prior to the application deadlines, and those who are not currently a partner can easily register here.