Through ANDE's Gender Equality Initiative (AGEI), we convened Gender Learning Communities across our eight chapters focusing on the barriers and discriminatory policies that women entrepreneurs face.

This Friday Jun 30, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, ANDE's Executive Director, Richenda Van Leeuwen, and Lola Adedokun of the Aspen Global Innovators Group discuss how to address disparities for women entrepreneurs.

ANDE East and Southeast Asia started our #GenderGems campaign to showcase key actors working to support women's entrepreneurship last year and again this year to explore how these amazing organizations across Southeast Asia embrace and incorporate a gender lens into their work.

We thank all participants, panelists and partners for their interest and participation in the first-ever ANDE South Asia Convening. Here's your roundup of all the sessions and resources from the three days!

Women’s economic empowerment (WEE) is so much more than building finance or accessing capital. Fostering WEE often leads to greater impact than may initially meet the eye - building a sense of independence, fostering women in leadership positions and creating transformative generational change as mothers leave behind an empowered legacy to their own daughters.

ANDE spoke with Rebecca Fries, Chief Executive Officer & Founder of Value For Women, to learn more about how her organization utilized and shaped ANDE membership from its founding a decade ago until today.

“It was a turning point for me,” said Ruchi Jain, Founder and CEO of Taru Naturals, about her trip to the villages of small-scale farmers in India struggling with the effects of climate change. “I realized that if you want to make a big impact on the world, you have to be grassroots based—it has to be a movement.” Since then, Jain has grown Taru Naturals into a fair-trade network connecting over 10,000 tribal and small-scale organic farmers across India to the resources and training they need to grow climate-resilient crops and markets to sell their products.

Read ANDE's break-down of recent IPCC reports to find out why SGB's should be at the center of the global fight against climate change.