Women’s Empowerment Collectives are Critical to Reaching Scale

Around the world, women join groups or collectives to provide economic and social support for each other. These groups take different forms, but they share common features, including voluntary membership, self-governance, contributions in the form of time, labor or money, regular meetings and the aim to empower and improve the welfare of their members. In rural areas, where access to financial and public services is limited, women’s collectives, such as chamas in Kenya, esusu in Nigeria or self-help groups in India, are critical to improving women’s health, livelihoods, empowerment and financial inclusion outcomes.

Often, women’s collectives are thought of as a critical source of social solidarity and resilience at the grassroots level. But what if women’s collectives could be leveraged to target and help unlock the economic empowerment of rural women at scale? In this blog post, we explore the potential transformative role women’s collectives can play in expediting women’s economic and social empowerment globally, and how the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is targeting these groups to address structural barriers to gender equality.

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