Together Women Rise is making a historic investment to create systemic change for women and girls around the world. In December, our board of directors approved three new Transformation Partnerships. Each partner will be given an Implementation Grant in the amount of $100,000 per year for two years (2022 and 2023). Thanks to your generosity, this amounts to a total investment of $600,000 in changing the world for women and girls! This is in addition to our Transformation Partnership with Shared Interest, which we announced earlier this year, and our Featured Grant Program.

Our three new Transformation Partnerships are:

#1: Landesa

Land rights for women are key for food security and gender equality. World-wide, women are a majority of land workers but a minority of landowners and, when they do own land, it is smaller plots of inferior land. Crop yield goes up with an increase in women’s land ownership, there is better child nutrition, women have greater decision-making power within the family, and girls in the family are better educated.

When women hold rights over land, unequal relationships between women and men are transformed, enabling women to claim agency and leadership within households, communities, and societies, shifting the needle toward gender justice.

Landesa is a 42-year-old organization that works in Tanzania, Kenya, Egypt, India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, among other countries. Since they began, they have been working to secure land titles for smallholder farmers and, for the last 30 years, they have focused on women’s land rights to further gender equality. They work with governments to change policies and with private corporations to directly support women in supply chains.

Landesa’s Center for Women’s Land Rights prioritizes deep collaboration with the broader gender equality and climate action movements, with the recognition that land is key as a foundation for both. The partnership between Together Women Rise and Landesa will contribute to Landesa’s efforts to secure women’s rights to land at the grassroots level in coordination with global, national, and grassroots organizations.

More info:

Stand for Her Land Campaign: This global advocacy campaign works to strengthen land rights for women around the world by closing the gap between laws and fulfilling promises of gender equality, by supporting coalitions of grassroots women and women-led organizations.

Why Women’s Land Rights Matter: This infographic presents the links between women’s rights to land and women’s fundamental human rights.

Additional resources on women’s land ownership:

Land and empowerment: The importance of female land ownership for food security

Women in Half the World Still Denied Land, Property Rights Despite Laws

The four things you need to know about women’s land rights

Women grow 70% of Africa’s food. But have few rights over the land they tend

#2: International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) 

The International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) is one of the world’s premier research institutes focused on tackling challenges facing women and girls worldwide. For nearly five decades, ICRW has been uncovering deep-rooted structural inequities and creating systems change in communities, institutions, and governments. ICRW believes that the closer we get to the source of these inequities, shed light on them, and find out how best to disrupt them, the closer we get to fostering and sustaining gender equity worldwide.

How ICRW Advances Systems Change

ICRW affects change through rigorous research uncovering the causes and costs of gender inequity and informing solutions. ICRW advances systems change by implementing programs that help young people, their families, and communities adopt new, more equitable gender norms through the following initiatives:

• direct, evidence-informed policy advocacy to drive gender equity into law;
• training organizations, businesses, and governments to design, integrate, and optimize programs, practices, and policies that advance gender equity;
• advising Fortune 1000 companies and global organizations to create institutional and social change related to gender equity with customizable services;
• bringing together partners who provide the diverse expertise and perspectives necessary.

Examples of ICRW’s Systems Change Work in India:

Gender Equity Movement in Schools (GEMS): The GEMs curriculum has proven to increase gender-equitable attitudes and decrease students’ tolerance for violent behavior. With over one in three women globally experiencing intimate partner violence or sexual violence by a non-partner at some point in their lives, these attitude shifts are essential.

Parivartan: Parivartan, meaning “transformation”, is a sports mentoring program, which uses a role model approach and integrated teaching-learning opportunities that engage adolescents to discuss and reflect on gender attitudes and behaviors and encourage them to question prevailing gendered practices and the use of violence.

Plan-It Girls adopts an ecosystem approach to build agency and gender equality at the local level, leveraging a catalytic personal advancement curriculum tailored for girls attending Grades 9 and 11 at government schools in Delhi (urban context) and two districts of Jharkhand (rural context). The intervention recognizes that a shift in gender norms is necessary to support girls’ aspirations, acquisition of skills, breaking of gender stereotypes, and reduction of resistance to girls’ success.

#3: Equimundo

Achieving gender equality will require significant changes in social norms. Changes in social norms relate to how we think, talk, work, raise our children, organize our social lives, and more. To achieve these changes in social norms, we cannot just work with women. We MUST work with men as well. It is neither possible nor desirable to work with only half the population and think we can make progress.

This is where Equimundo comes in. Equimundo is the premiere global organization working to engage men and boys as allies in gender equality, promote healthy manhood, and prevent violence. Equimundo works to promote nurturing, non-violent, equitable masculinity. They offer lessons about how to reform the care economy more equitably; they create videos for boys showing healthier role models; they conduct critical research to better understand social change around gender; they circulate effective social media messages about new roles for men and boys, and so much more.

With this partnership, our Together Women Rise community will be part of a movement that engages men and boys to be equal partners in the care economy, assists men and boys to live out diverse, equitable, and healthy masculinities, and prevents gender-based violence.

Equimundo’s major areas of focus are:

• Equity of care – working to achieve equitable distribution of care and promote caring versions of masculinity. Globally, women carry out more than three times the hands-on care of children and households compared to men. The equal contribution of men to daily care work is necessary for full equality for women, for the well-being of children, for men themselves, and for healthy, just, nonviolent societies.
• Gender socialization – promoting environments that support boys and young men to live out diverse, equitable, and healthy masculinities.
• Prevention of violence – working to prevent violence carried out by men and boys and perpetuated by harmful versions of masculinity.
• Thought lab – carrying out research on new and emerging themes related to masculinity, social justice, and structural inequality.

Watch for more information and learning opportunities on these Transformation Partnerships throughout the year.