Press Release: Women entrepreneurs to foster prosperity across the world - 18 September 2024

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: KC Koch (phone: 303 884 4534, email: kkoch@ideglobal.org)

NEW YORK/DENVER – (September 18, 2024) 

International nonprofit, iDE, is announcing its audacious, new 10-year strategy, which focuses on powering women entrepreneurs, as the most effective and equitable way to end poverty. Under the strategy:

iDE will power 1 million women entrepreneurs to foster prosperity in their communities for 100 million people

iDE CEO Elizabeth Welch said she was delighted to announce the strategy, which is based on a large body of academic evidence, input from gender experts, and more than 40 years of implementation experience, that identifies women’s entrepreneurship as a key driver of prosperity within low and middle-income communities.

“As iDE continues to deploy its business approach, so far impacting more than 42 million people worldwide, our aim is to ensure inclusive participation in markets, especially for women. That’s because evidence shows that when you power women economically, you power communities and build prosperity for all,” said Welch.

“With more than four decades of experience, and a legacy of building inclusive markets that serve last-mile and peri-urban areas, we know that incubating and enabling women-led businesses will significantly accelerate human progress and deliver economic benefits for underserved communities.”

To promote this bold new strategy, iDE is launching Project Fury: Igniting the Power of Women to End Poverty, a global campaign designed to transform the 10-year strategy into a global movement. Project Fury celebrates the success of women entrepreneurs in iDE’s programs, promotes a feeling of intense passion for change, and opens the door to dialogue and debate on improving the lives of families living in poverty.

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, projects that contribute to women’s empowerment by focusing on social and financial barriers (such as sensitization activities with partners to allow for equal decision making power over income and/or resources) are also significantly more effective in increasing household incomes, dietary diversity, food security and resilience than projects that do not address women’s empowerment. In particular, results show that the number of people that see appreciable gains in their incomes increases by 5 percentage points and the number of people that see significant gains in resilience increases by 20 percentage points.

In combating the status quo, iDE has spent the last two years thinking critically about what we do best as an organization, bringing in experts, building capacity and forming partnerships where needed. We plan to implement the strategy in all 12 countries we presently run projects, across Africa, Asia and Latin America within the sectors of agriculture, nutrition, climate resilience and WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene).

Currently, we are working to identify the most effective investments around powering entrepreneurs and developing user journeys, mapping the barriers that women face and creating action plans to systematically remove these barriers and power them towards prosperity. This comprehensive approach ensures we are doing no harm, as we help build resilient market ecosystems for communities to thrive.

To measure the impact of the strategy, we are expanding our data collection, moving beyond income alone, and extending our measurement approach to track “prosperity” as well. To inform our approach, we are centering our clients' voices through participatory, qualitative measurement approaches such as “Most Significant Change” that deliver a rich picture of what is happening.

In 2023, iDE completed its last audacious goal of impacting “20 Million More” people, doubling the number of people impacted by the organization, in a fraction of the time it took to impact the first 20 million.