Giving Compass' Take:

• Philanthropy Women interviews Chandra Alexandre, Global Fund for Women’s Vice-President of Development, about her organization's work to empower women and girls around the world.

• One of the Global Fund's main goals is to foster systemic change. While their influence is growing, Alexandre stresses the need for more funding when it comes to women's human rights, especially outside the U.S.

• Want to hear about more efforts to create gender equality? Here's how the MasterCard Foundation is accelerating the growth of women-owned businesses.

“We focus on women at the grassroots, aligning our grant-making strategies and priorities to fit their needs,” says Chandra Alexandre, Global Fund for Women’s Vice-President of Development. The goal is to leverage local knowledge and expertise with donor funds to create system-level change for women in the Global South.

Global Fund for Women is headquartered in San Francisco, but five members of its 41-person staff are in New York, and four more work remotely from various locales. The organization was founded in 1987, and since then has invested in roughly 5,000 grassroots organizations in 175 countries. Its approach encompasses both advocacy and grant-making, with an emphasis on supporting, funding and partnering with women-led groups and movements. According to their website: “Our vision is that every woman and girl is strong, safe, powerful, and heard. No exceptions.”

Global Fund for Women invests in projects of various scales and durations, depending on local needs and conditions on the ground. A major recent initiative was a 2017 partnership focusing on garment workers, undertaken with the NoVo Foundation, C&A Foundation and Gender at Work. The effort is combating gender-based violence and improving working condition for women in major garment-producing countries including India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Myanmar and Cambodia.

The aim is to activate local women to become agents of change, with garment workers learning about their rights, acting on those rights, and creating systemic change. The initial round of grants to local organizations were awarded last summer.

Read the full article about how Global Fund For Women is growing by Tim Lehnert at Philanthropy Women.