Policy plays a key role in advancing economic justice for women.

Our Advocacy Program raises awareness about the need for more enabling public policy on financial inclusion and entrepreneurship for women. Women’s economic empowerment is fundamental to the promotion of human rights and social justice around the world. It is essential for poverty alleviation, economic growth, and human development. Because we believe public policy can play a critical role in eliminating gender disparities, we encourage policy makers to collect and analyze sex-disaggregated data on all key social and economic indicators.

Across the globe, women and girls suffer purely due to the fact that they were born female.

We advocate for policies that remove barriers to women’s entrepreneurship and encourage the financial sector to reach down market to serve the poor. Our goal is to raise awareness about the plight of impoverished women who suffer from predatory lending practices in the informal economy. We are also promoting regulations that make it easier for the general public to invest in women’s enterprises. Increasing access to affordable financial services for marginalized women in the informal sector is critical to the long-term, global transformation of local economies.

We advocate for women’s rights through international organizations such as the UN, the Microcredit Summit, and the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum for trade and investment. Our organization’s CEO Patricia Foley Hinnen represented the United States on microfinance and gender issues at policy meetings with APEC’s 21-member countries for over a decade after 9-11. During that time, she led the U.S. delegation for the APEC Women Leader’s Network, spearheaded the creation of the Microenterprise Working group, and helped establish the Gender Focal Point Network so that women leaders from the 21 countries could review APEC policy recommendations with a gender-lens.