About WomenStrong
At WomenStrong International, we believe that women and girls are best served by programs in their own communities. Yet, community-based women-led organizations often lack the resources, technical support, networks, and visibility needed to achieve their full potential. WomenStrong’s mission is to help address these challenges. To create meaningful and sustainable change, we know the importance of working closely with our partners to address issues at their very root, to ensure that women and girls will truly thrive. We believe this work will lead to a world in which all women and girls are free to prosper and to live their lives in dignity and peace.
Mission and Vision
Our Mission
WomenStrong International advances progress toward gender equality by partnering with grassroots urban women-led organizations dedicated to improving the lives of the girls and women they serve. Through capacity strengthening and trust-based funding, we move power and money into the hands of local women-led organizations that know best what their communities need. We support our partners in determining their own priorities and implementing gender-responsive initiatives tailored to their on-the-ground realities and needs. Partners are addressing some of the most critical needs of women and girls: keeping girls in school, accessing lifesaving reproductive health care, preventing gender-based violence, and creating pathways to economic security. Partners come together in our Learning Lab to share findings, gain insights, and test innovative solutions. We work directly with partners to strengthen their systems and programs, leverage additional investments, and heighten their visibility.
View our Strategic Plan for 2023 – 2026.
Our Vision
Women and girls are better served by programs in their communities, leading to a world in which all women and girls are free to prosper and to live their lives in dignity and peace.
Herstory
WomenStrong International grew out of the Millennium Cities Initiative, a project of Columbia University’s Earth Institute designed to help move 11 sub-Saharan cities closer to eradicating extreme poverty and achieving the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.
Over more than a decade, we saw women in these communities rely on their own creativity, perseverance, and grit to provide for their families; these women became our go-to source of knowledge of what works, to obtain the health care they needed, see their daughters thrive in school, earn a decent living, live free of violence, and build a more just and prosperous world.
WomenStrong was co-created with our brilliant leaders in Ghana and Kenya and their respective organizations, and we expanded our geographic and cultural focus to include our founding partner organizations in India, Haiti, and the United States.
Today, WomenStrong’s community of partners has grown to include 19 current partners across 17 countries, from Asia, across the sub-Saharan region, to the Americas. These highly capable women-led organizations receive funding, capacity strengthening, and enhanced visibility, and they come together in our WomenStrong Learning Lab, to develop, test, sharpen, and amplify their solutions in the same areas of learning, to help women and girls meet their most basic needs – for health, education, violence prevention, and economic security and opportunity.