Newspress

Today, Administrator Samantha Power announced the roll out of the Gender Equity and Equality Action (GEEA) Fund during the launch of the U.S. Strategy on Global Women's Economic Security. As USAID advances the U.S. Strategy on Global Women's Economic Security, the Agency will strive to increase incomes and opportunities for women, recognizing that this benefits entire communities, economies, and countries.

By doubling its investments in gender equality in FY 2023, USAID will expand its programming on women's economic security - from increasing their access to well-paying, quality jobs to strengthening the care economy and promoting entrepreneurship. This commitment includes the GEEA Fund, which is starting its activities with $300 million, including $100 million per year in direct FY 2021 and FY 2022 appropriations and an additional $100 million in FY 2022 appropriations attributed to the Fund.

The GEEA Fund advances economic security for women and girls by increasing their access to resources, services, and leadership opportunities and by addressing the barriers that limit their ability to participate fully in the economy. The Fund invests in partners around the world, prioritizing programs that address the disproportionate impact of COVID-19, climate change, conflict, and crisis on women and girls. The GEEA Fund is managed by USAID's Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment Hub and implemented by USAID and the State Department.

USAID's GEEA activities include the Invest in Childcare public-private partnership to support childcare in low-and middle-income countries; the Climate Gender Equity Fund to increase the availability of climate finance for women-led climate organizations and businesses; and the African Women's Trade and Investment Project to increase women's participation in leadership and management positions in trade-related industries and sectors across Africa.

MORE

Tuesday, December 6, 2022 USAID Announces Safe from the Start ReVisioned Initiative to Prevent and Respond to Gender-Based Violence in Emergencies

Today, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in partnership with the U.S. Department of State launched Safe from the Start ReVisioned, an initiative that focuses on improving and expanding protection services for women and girls from the start of every conflict or disaster. Because crises like natural disasters or conflicts exacerbate conditions of inequality, they disproportionately impact women and girls. Support systems that are supposed to keep them safe - like families, communities, and governments - can fall apart in an emergency, drastically increasing the risks of gender-based violence (GBV) and making it hard to find desperately needed medical care or the services of social workers and counselors.

Safe from the Start ReVisioned demonstrates the United States' commitment to advance a gender-transformative approach in humanitarian response that promotes women's leadership, prioritizes support and advocacy for GBV prevention and survivor-centered response programming, and shifts funding, influence, and decision-making power to women and girls within humanitarian response systems.

The overarching goal of this initiative is to better prevent and respond to the many forms of GBV that become magnified in emergencies, such as intimate partner violence, child marriage, and sexual violence. To do so, it calls on the global community to not only improve, but change, conventional humanitarian response by putting women and girls at the center of these efforts, as leaders and key stakeholders.

The original Safe from the Start initiative, which was launched in 2013, helped draw global attention to GBV programming as an essential, life-saving intervention from the onset of every humanitarian response. In early 2021, USAID and the State Department reflected on the significant progress made by Safe from the Start and developed a more ambitious framework. The result - Safe from the Start ReVisioned - is a new, even bolder step forward.

Safe from the Start ReVisioned focuses on improving and expanding humanitarian protection services for women and girls, such as GBV case management, psychosocial support, safe spaces, and peer support networks. Since women and girls often lead the recovery of their communities as front-line responders, experts, and service providers, it also emphasizes the need to shift power to crisis-affected women and recognize them as experts in their own safety and as leaders in their communities. Through this program, USAID and the State Department recommit to leading the global community in responding to the needs of women and girls, in all their diversity, from the very start of every conflict or disaster.