Equality for Women and Girls Current Funding Priorities

Achieving Outcomes for Girls and Women in Central America

Program Priorities: The EWG Program provides grants to organizations primarily based or working in Central America with the goal of supporting efforts to disrupt problematic gender norms and indicators and accelerate reaching SDG 5’s targets. Locally-driven efforts are critical to girls and young women reaching their full potential as healthy, empowered and productive women and to ensure continued and accelerating impact. Multiple strategies and a holistic approach are needed to achieve gender equality.

We have identified the following primary program priorities to help drive SDG indicators up or down, as appropriate. Many of our grantee partners’ efforts connect to multiple priorities because the social change involved is complex and multi-faceted.

Fostering Girls’ Education and Empowerment: support grantee partners that reach girls and other main gatekeepers (parents, teachers, community leaders) to enable girls to stay in school, build agency and improve self-efficacy.
Improving Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health: support grantee partners that extend and improve the quality of youth-friendly, geographically proximate, affordable and culturally appropriate SRH services and education.
Expanding Women’s Economic Opportunity and Livelihoods: support grantee partners that enable women to gain soft and hard skills to participate in economic activity that respects their rights.
Engaging Boys and Men: support grantee partners that prioritize targeting boys and men as partners in transforming gender norms in their relationships, communities and beyond.
Preventing Child, Early and Forced Marriage and Unions: support grantee partners that address drivers of child, early and forced marriage and unions at the individual, community and national levels, while fully respecting adolescents’ right to healthy sexuality.
Supporting Youth Leadership: resource young leaders to drive efforts to improve gender equality and adolescent sexual and reproductive health and rights.

Indicators

The EWG Program priorities touch several of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). SDG 5 provides both our long-term goal and a solid framework of targets and indicators for the Equality for Women and Girls (EWG) Program. Understanding that many of the SDGs are interconnected, we also look at some of the targets and indicators associated with SDG 4 and SDG 3. We monitor the relevant SDG indicators in our focus countries as often as new data becomes available and we encourage our grantee partners to access available national and sub-national data to drive their theories of change.

We also look to UNDP’s Gender Inequality Index (GII), the best available composite indicator to monitor and compare countries’ progress over time. Introduced in 2010, it looks at different aspects of each of the following dimensions: health, empowerment and labor market. Read more about the Gender Inequality Index here. The change in GII over time for each Summit focus country is listed below. As a reference, the US and corresponding data are also listed.

A breakdown of each of the three components included in the GII in the Summit focus countries (and the USA) can be seen below:

In addition to the GII, among the indicators the EWG Program tracks most closely because of their link to our priorities are the following:

Adolescent fertility rate
Population with at least some secondary school education
Child marriage/ informal union rates
Labor Force Participation
Existence of favorable sexual and reproductive health and rights environment (Mira que te Miro)
Met need for contraception

For more information regarding the grantmaking of the Equality for Women and Girls program, please see the expanded program four pager and our Recent Grants page.