Deadline: 2 April 2017
The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves is currently accepting applications for its fourth annual Women’s Empowerment Fund (WEF), a financing mechanism designed to scale effective business models for empowerment through women’s energy entrepreneurship.
The objective of the WEF is to make the business case for gender-informed approaches by demonstrating that there is a positive impact on business performance and social impact outcomes.
Focus Areas
- Establishing a strong evidence base and evaluating effective approaches;
- Increasing access to finance to integrate women’s empowerment into the sector;
- Building capacity of enterprises and women entrepreneurs;
- Raising awareness and generating demand among women consumers and adolescent girls and boys; and
- Influencing and setting international and national policies and processes
Funding Information
- The WEF will award up to four grants in the suggested range of US$75,000-$150,000 to qualifying organizations.
- The selected WEF projects will have a 12-month timeframe to meet concrete objectives and performance milestones.
Eligibility Criteria
- Organizational Type/Legal Structure: Organizations can include but are not limited to for-profit companies, social enterprises, foundations, non-profits, universities, research institutes, faith-based institutions.
- Focus Countries: All qualified individuals and organizations, regardless of location, are encouraged to apply. The Alliance will give preference for partners operating in Alliance focus countries, but organizations operating in other countries are also encouraged to apply. The Alliance will select the most qualified applications regardless of location; the preference for Alliance focus countries is only weighted if the Alliance needs to make a final selection between applications of comparable quality.
- Alliance Partnership: The applicant organization must be a registered partner of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. Applicants who are not currently a Partner must be registered prior to submitting their application.
- Impact: The applicant must be focused on driving highly scalable gender and empowerment impacts in alignment with the Alliance’s mission to save lives, improve livelihoods, empower women, and protect the environment. Applicants are required to align impact indicators and measurement methodologies with the Alliance’s Social Impact Measurement System and must include indicators related to fuel procurement time use and cooking time use.
- Applicants are required to bundle two or more household energy products. The proposed intervention must be within the clean and/or efficient cooking value chain, and applications may also bundle additional non-cooking energy products.
- Strong preference will be given to applicants that have not previously received funding under the Women’s Empowerment Fund.
- Preference will be given to organizations that are woman-owned, woman-led and/or -managed.
- Preference will be given to applications that include technologies/fuels that have testing available that follow protocols that have been mapped to IWA tier ratings for laboratory testing, using the requirements specified in the IWA. Information for specific testing methodologies and protocols are available on the Alliance webpage. Applicants are required to submit any available testing results with the application.
- Preference will be given to applications that leverage funding from other sources.
How to Apply
Applications must be submitted by email at the address given website.
Eligible Countries: China, Bangladesh, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, India, and Guatemala.
For more information, please visit Women’s Empowerment Fund.