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.

ANDE is analyzing the promising project data from AWEF Asia projects, which concluded at the end of 2021. One of the early key learnings is that women entrepreneurs who participated in AWEF Asia funded programs reported increased confidence, self-efficacy, financial and investment literacy, and ability to critically evaluate potential investment and financing options.

ANDE spoke to Jona Resphiti of MIT-D-Lab about the organization’s ANDE-funded project under the Advancing Women’s Empowerment Fund to better prepare female founders seeking capital and support investors in bringing more inclusivity to their practices, including impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the project in India and an upcoming simulation of what it’s like to be a female founder trying to raise $5 million.