Launching the Gender Action Collective
We are pleased to launch the Gender Action Collective in Uganda and Tanzania, with the aim of uniting gender-focused support organizations and women entrepreneurs.
The Collective is our response to the fragmentation in the women empowerment ecosystem. Across East Africa, there are many brilliant actors doing excellent work on women’s economic empowerment including accelerators, researchers generating evidence, investors, ESOs and more.
However, most of us are doing it in silos. We gather similar data, design similar solutions without building on each other’s learnings and advocate, often powerfully but without coordination. And the women at the centre of it all navigate a landscape that is, as a result, incoherent, full of good intentions and fragmented execution.
The Collective is an attempt to build the connective tissue the ecosystem is missing. It convenes ecosystem builders and women entrepreneurs to:
- Generate data-driven insights
- Drive policy and capital reform
- Advocate for financial inclusion
- Measure ecosystem impact
- Turn dialogue into coordinated action
The goal is not to add another initiative to an already crowded space, but to build the shared infrastructure that makes the existing work more powerful. The collective is open to partners committed to transforming Africa’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
The collective will drive measurable change by
- Collecting data on the demographics and needs of women entrepreneurs and measuring the impact of various efforts undertaken in the ecosystem so far.
- Leveraging the collective expertise of its members to co-create solutions.
- Driving meaningful conversations on the experiences of women entrepreneurs via research and thought leadership.
- Advocating for policy changes that unlock financing and opportunities for women entrepreneurs.
- Tracking progress and measuring impact via robust monitoring and evaluation mechanisms.