Empowering Women to Change the World of Tomorrow
By Amelia Wu, Vice President, Programs and Evaluation, the Global Fund for Women

The Global Fund for Women, the largest grantmaking foundation in the world that focuses exclusively on women's rights, provides funding to seed, strength, and link women's organizations around the world. Since it was founded in 1987, it has granted over $38 million to more than 2,600 women's groups in 160 countries. Grantees work on a broad range of women's rights issues, including increasing women's economic independence, expanding girls' access to education, stopping violence against women, and improving women's health and reproductive rights. Our grants benefit the most disenfranchised and marginalized women around the world.

The Global Fund was founded by Anne Firth Murray in response to an emerging global women's movement. At the forefront of innovative social change, few groups had access to funds from mainstream foundations, corporations, or individuals to support their work. Hence, the Global Fund was created to award small, flexible grants (with minimal bureaucracy) to grassroots women's rights groups in the following innovative ways

• allow the groups themselves to define their own priorities;
• involve local advisors in the decision-making process;
• listen to and learn from women's experiences

In essence, the Global Fund awards small grants as venture capital for innovative social ventures. The Global Fund raises funding primarily in the U.S. from over 10,000 individuals and hundreds of larger foundations. In doing so, we connect U.S. investors with social entrepreneurs in villages and towns around the globe.

The Global Fund is committed to investing in women and girls because, demographically, they represent the poorest of the poor, the least educated, and the most vulnerable to violence. Although women and girls make up more than half the world's population, they receive a disproportionately small share of local, national, and international resources. This is reflected in the huge disparity between the economic and social situation of women and girls as compared to men and boys. Over 70 percent of the 1.6 billion people living in "severe poverty," as defined by the World Bank, are women and girls. There is no country in the world where women's wages are equal to those of men.

While women and girls constitute the disenfranchised, they also represent a population with the greatest potential for contributing their talents to bring about change. Study after study shows that educating women and girls is among the most cost-effective means to achieving sustainable development. Educated women tend to marry later, earn more, and have fewer, healthier, and better-educated children. Moreover, governments are coming to understand that there can be no peace, security, or sustainable economic progress without women's equal participation in all spheres of society--both public and private.

One of the greatest hopes for this century lies in the leaders emerging from the worldwide women's movement. There is no dearth of leaders at the community level, but these leaders are no widely known. In fact, most work in communities with limited resources and have little official influence. What links them is that they have all made personal choices to lead by example--voting, engaging in local activism, participating in international philanthropy, and building community.

As leaders in higher education, I challenge you to think differently about the way you do your work

• first, make a stronger link between what occurs internationally and what takes place in the domestic sphere;
• second, challenge our young people to truly pursue a liberal education--to study the world broadly, to make connections among different disciplines, and to view the world holistically;
• third, teach about discrimination and educate about inequality, particularly gender inequality, so that students can truly understand the world as it is today and think critically about it;
• finally, challenge our young people to think creatively, apply their energies, and take personal responsibility for changing the world of tomorrow-as Gandhi once said, "to be the change we want to see."