At Vital Voices, it starts with a woman leader. She recognizes a problem in her community and commits to solving it while accelerating development, equality and peace.

Why we care: Women’s full participation in society is proven to accelerate development, equality and peace. And yet, only 1% of the world’s landowners are women, only 19% of the world’s parliamentarians are female, and an estimated 80% of those trapped in modern day slavery are women and girls.

How we’re solving this: To realize the global potential that women represent, Vital Voices identifies, invests, and brings visibility to leaders who advance development in ways that benefit society as a whole.

With your help, Vital Voices will implement a program to identify, invest, and bring visibility to extraordinary women to help unleash their leadership potential to transform lives. Funds from this project will strengthen our network of women in places like Kenya and around the world. The project will focus on three areas of development:

• Human rights and the creation of an environment free of violence against women and human trafficking by strengthening the implementation of adequate legal frameworks, enhancing women leaders’ capacity to provide services to victims, and changing attitudes and behaviors about gender- based violence.
• Economic development and entrepreneurship to help expand women’s economic engagement and entrepreneurship by focusing on small and medium sized enterprise (SME) development, increasing access to finance and policymaking, building the capacity of businesswomen’s networks which integrate women into global markets, and developing the next generation of business leaders through training and mentoring.
• Political and public leadership to create opportunities for women to effectively exercise their political agency and amplify their voices by enhancing advocacy skills, connecting leaders to a global network of mentors, and promoting the value of women’s leadership in advancing legislative and policy reform.

In 15 years of working with women leaders, we’ve discovered something remarkable: women leaders are multipliers. They take their new expertise and access information and networks, and ‘pay it forward’ to the next wave of women leaders. This powerful ripple effect triggers new progress toward greater political participation, economic empowerment, and human rights.