About WEE

Over the last few years, there has been increasing evidence about the importance of gender equality and women’s empowerment in inclusive economic development. Increasingly, donors and practitioners focus on women’s economic empowerment, yet moving from conceptual ideas to systemic and measurable changes for women remains a challenge. Many practitioners are working in this space, creating new tools and programs to empower women within market systems to participate fully and in a sustained way. SEEP is leading this movement by creating a space where inclusive economic development practitioners can connect to share and document learning, resources, and strategies for the design of effective women’s economic empowerment programming, and by building partnerships with other global networks to create broader development impact.

Goal

The overall goal of the SEEP Women’s Economic Empowerment Working Group (WEEWG) is to improve the ability of market systems and other inclusive economic development practitioners to facilitate inclusive, empowering and sustainable services to women across the globe. The group aims to achieve this by bringing together inclusive economic development practitioners committed to sharing and documenting good practices, tools, and resources to bridge knowledge gaps and strengthen the impact of our women’s economic empowerment initiatives.  The WEEWG will directly benefit practitioners working to empower women economically by creating a learning network and space to communicate good practices and lessons learned. SEEP also will work to build partnerships with other networks working on gender equality and social change. Women worldwide will benefit directly from organizations that are able to integrate proven and tested, scalable, and sustainable interventions to improve women’s economic empowerment.

Initial Workplan (2015)

Many activities were discussed at the WEEWG launch meeting at the 2014 SEEP conference. After collecting everyone’s feedback who joined the launch meeting, the first year activities will focus on the following priorities:

• CONNECT. Build working group membership and connect with each other
• Rolling profiles of members on the SEEP WEEWG website
• Semi-annual  working  group  meetings  (one   in   person  meeting  at  annual conference and one on-line)
• Quarterly newsletter updates
• Exploring collaboration with BEAM network
• Strengthening collaboration with other SEEP Working Groups

• SHARE. Sharing of WEE tools and resources
• Quarterly peer reviews of new tools and resources
• Blogging on topics of interest
• Ongoing updates to WEE resource library on SEEP website
• Identifying gaps (and funding!) for development of new Learning Products

• THRIVE. Learning and expanding our knowledge
• Identify key learning priorities and new process and/or products to address them
• Joint  webinars   and  e-discussions  with  UN  Women’s:  Women’s  Economic Empowerment Knowledge Gateway (4 planned webinars for 2015)
• Contributing to the USAID-funded Leveraging Economic Opportunities learning agenda for women’s economic empowerment

To do this, we will need your help!  What can you do to be part of the WEEWG group?

• Join!  Sign  up  here  to  join  the  WEEWG  to  learn  more  about  women’s  economic empowerment and receive newsletters, event announcements and group member opportunities.
• Contribute!  When you sign up to join the WEEWG mailing group, you can also become a contributor. Contributors help plan events and contribute to our future network activities.  This could include taking part in occasional peer reviews and sharing of resources. When you sign up here, remember to indicate your interest to contribute.
• Member  Champions!  You can also become a Member Champion when you sign up for the WEEWG.  Member champions will work with the two group facilitators to identify key learning priorities, get the word out about the group’s activities, actively contribute to peer reviews, blogging or identification of new partnerships and activities.