On March 12, 2024, AIF’s CEO, Nishant Pandey was invited by The Rockefeller Foundation to speak at a roundtable in partnership with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Network of Foundation Working for Development (netFWD) as part of the 68th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) convenings at the United Nations.
Navigating the Different Routes to Resourcing Equality: How philanthropic foundations support gender equality and women’s empowerment
Moderator: Gaëlle Ferrant, netFWD Co-ordinator, OECD Development Centre
Panelists:
Nadia Ahidjo, Director of Partnerships and Philanthropy, African Women’s Development Fund
Ophélie Bourhis, Senior Advisor Partnerships, Agence française de développement
Nishant Pandey, CEO, American India Foundation
Kristina Wintermeier, International Programme Manager, Fondation CHANEL
Below are highlights of Nishant’s perspectives shared at the panel.
Question: Tracking the impact of gender-related philanthropy is complex. Indeed, it is still extremely difficult and expensive to assess, identify, measure and report on gender-transformative approaches that work towards societal change.
Nishant, can you please tell us more about how the American India Foundation, which is committed to catalyzing social and economic change for women in India, tracks and evaluates its gender-related spending and impact?
Thank you, Gaëlle. I want to thank the OECD Development Centre and Rockefeller Foundation for inviting me.
The challenge around tracking and measurement of impact has already been outlined in the presentation made by Bathylle Missika from OECD. First, I want to acknowledge that by no means we have cracked this challenge at AIF. We have to just continuously learn from each other on how to advance our understanding and practice on this subject. So I am happy that it is one of the questions posed today although I am not sure I am happy that it has been posed to me–yes, measurement can be a dull subject!
I will answer the question based on AIF’s work obviously so let me start by saying a bit about the organization. AIF is one of the largest operating foundations in the US-India corridor. Our mission is to empower underprivileged women, children and youth in India. Because poverty is multi-dimensional, we work on health, education and livelihoods with gender and environmental justice as cross-cutting themes. We partner with the US and the Indian governments, including state and local governments across India, dozens of corporate foundations and foundations such as Ford Foundation, MacArthur, Oak Foundation, Bloomberg, and so on.
The Indian context where AIF works is challenging so AIF takes a cradle-to-employment approach–starting from adolescent girls to when a woman conceives to newborns to children up to two years in our multi-award winning Maternal And Newborn Survival Initiative (MANSI) program to pre-school children and middle school, high school children in our two education programs – Digital Equalizer (DE) where STEM for Girls is a big priority and the Learning and Migration Program (LAMP) where arresting school drop out of girls in some of the remotest and most underserved migrant communities, to skilling, employability and entrepreneurship development for youth in our livelihoods program, to service leadership through our 23 year old binational Fellowship program in the US-India corridor. In all of this work, we focus on girls and women in a continuous context of life-cycle engagement.
As we know gender-transformative change involves three key dimensions of agency, relational, and structural and each one of these 3 domains is deeply interconnected with the others.
It is usually seen that it is relatively easier and therefore common to track indicators around individual agency level – skills, income, assets etc. While important, it doesn’t necessarily capture how relations are forming or transforming or how social norms and legal frameworks are shifting to promote gender equality at household, markets or societal levels.
So what it means in simple terms is that we should measure:
- Changes in social norms in addition to changes in laws and policies
- Changes within power relations in addition to how women’s lives are changing as economic and political actors within markets and communities
Just to give some examples, under our health work – we measure malnutrition, stunting and wasting and how it varies among girls and boys.
Along with this we also track qualitative indicators around social norms around gendered roles such as:
- Giving young children a bath and feeding them are only a woman’s responsibility: The “No” answer to this statement improved by 13.7%.
- The father/husband alone mainly should decide about spending household money: The “No” answer to this statement improved by 21.9%.
In our education programs, 3.5 million girls have benefitted so far. In addition to enrollment rates, dropout rates and learning outcomes in our STEM for Girls program, we also track indicators around aspirations, confidence, such as, after two years of intervention:
- 84% in the community felt that girls can equally excel in science & engineering, as compared to boys.
- In one study, we saw that sensitizing parents helped significantly in addressing gender-based perceptions. For example, only 7% of parents in the AIF treatment group felt that STEM education was more suited for male students as compared to 24% of the parents in control areas who held this gender-biased view on STEM education.
Under one of our livelihoods program called Entre-Prerana which is about financial and digital inclusion of street vendors, around 150,000 women street vendors have benefited so far and our latest evaluation showed 82% of the female vendors reported an increase in their income in the past 12-18 month. But, in addition,
- Impact stories have shown significant differences in the women’s positioning at individual, household, and community level. For example, the reduction in the percentage of vendors paying bribes is 18% now against 36% in the baseline which shows their increasing negotiating power with institutions such as municipalities, police, and other actors in the justice system.
We also measure cost effectiveness. In Entre-Prerana, for a philanthropic investment of $2.5 million, we have unlocked $50 million in private and public capital as working capital loans for street vendors.
And last but not the least, to be able to undertake robust gender analysis and program design, program staff and partners themselves must be sensitive to norms, relations and power—in terms of gender as well as other axes of power and social relations. So it is absolutely critical to invest in staff capacity on these issues.
Question: The philanthropic sector is highly concentrated, with the top ten foundations providing 78% of gender-related philanthropic funding over the 2018-2022 period. What are the 3 most important features to take into account for foundations seeking to integrate a gender lens across their portfolios?
This is my favorite question because this precisely what we do…integrate a gender lens across our program portfolio. We have been doing it for more than 20 years now and again we haven’t become perfect at it but we have happily embraced progress over perfection.
If I have to talk about lessons, we have learnt in the last few years (post-COVID).
The first one will be using an integrated approach for program design, especially if you have a multi-theme strategy.
We ran a strategy refresh process after COVID to see what revisions, if any, we need to take into account the post-COVID context and to be able to address the more medium- to long-term implications of COVID on communities – for example on the girl child. In addition to learning regression and the negative impact on nutrition that she was facing due to prolonged closure of schools and Anganwadi centres, she was also facing a much higher risk of early marriage, mental health issues, and so on. And therefore, one of the things that came out was that we were not optimizing the fact that we have capabilities across 3 verticals – health, education and livelihoods. We have since designed and launched 2 integrated initiatives:
- SAHELI – Saheli means “friend”, but used for friends who are girls. And it stands for Support Adolescent girls Health, Education and Livelihoods Initiative.
- SNEH – SNEH translates to “love” in Hindi…and in true AIF fashion, is an acronym that stands for Skilling, Nutrition, Education, and Health. If you know AIF, you know we love acronymsJ
It’s about going back to the multifaceted and multidimensional nature of the problem – we work across the life cycle of a woman’s life in an integrated fashion – start young with our health pillar advocating for nutrition for newborns and children, then move to our education program – DE and LAMP and then to livelihoods.
The second lesson is on intersectionality – designing programs at the intersection of identity, migration, climate change, and women’s economic empowerment. India has around 150 million people who engage in what’s called distress seasonal migration. Most of this migration happens due to environmental stress. Until now we have looked at this context from a children’s education perspective so that the next generation can come out of this vicious cycle using education as a vehicle. However, now we are looking at it as a resilience issue as well. How do we build resilience among migrant communities, how do we use women’s economic empowerment approaches to help communities diversify their livelihood options so that they don’t depend on climate vulnerable sectors such agriculture and how do we make agriculture itself more climate friendly. We have just finished designing a program at the intersection of migration, climate change, and women’s economic empowerment and we are looking for partners so we can roll it out in some of the poorest parts of India.
The third lesson is investing in service leadership – through Banyan Impact Fellowship (BIF). Women’s leadership in the civic leadership in the citizen diplomacy space – for a different socio-economic background but very important nonetheless. We have expanded the program to the US as well. And we are doubling down our efforts to grow our Circle of Hope – across 5 chapters and growing a circle of women in the US who engage with and support women’s issues in India and give them a tangible platform to be able to do so.
One last point I want to mention is leverage – use philanthropic capital to unlock private and public resources e.g. of Entre-Prerana, which has already leveraged $40-50 million against an initial philanthropic investment of $2.5million. This has really encouraged us to aim to create and grow 100,000 women led micro businesses across poor and marginalized communities of urban and rural India over the next 3 years, across varied sectors and value chains such as street vending, artisanal products, food processing, and agriculture etc.
So these are some lessons that we are integrating on using a gender lens across our AIF program portfolio.
