Dear colleagues,

On International Women’s Day, the world is reminded of the continued struggle for women’s rights and gender equality.  Alongside ongoing efforts, women’s groups may have the potential to improve the well-being of some of the world’s poorest women by bringing them together to provide economic and social support to one another. However, we need more and better evidence to understand how these groups work in different contexts, their costs, and their impact.

That’s why we are pleased to share a new resource on women’s groups: the official website of the Evidence Consortium on Women’s Groups (the ECWG). Our consortium aims to generate and synthesize rigorous evidence to guide and strengthen programming and policies on women’s groups. In our first blog post, ECWG co-principal investigators Drs. Thomas de Hoop and Sapna Desai explain why we do this work and what we hope to learn in the years ahead. They also provide more details on the research the ECWG hopes to produce in the coming years in a learning agenda.

Our new website features the latest on our work and the most up-to-date news and research on women’s groups, including a searchable repository of over 400 studies. We also share tools developed to measure economic and empowerment outcomes of women’s groups, guides to measure the costs and cost-effectiveness of women’s groups, and an analysis of a portfolio of selected investments in women’s groups.

We hope that this new website will be a useful resource – and that you will help spread the word with the tweet below. We invite you to work with us, share your blogs on our website, and let us know about upcoming events where you’ll be presenting your latest work by reaching out to Thomas de Hoop at the American Institutes for Research (tdehoop@air.org) or Sapna Desai at the Population Council (sdesai@popcouncil.org).

We look forward to collaborating with you, learning from your work, and charting a way forward together for evidence on women’s groups.

Best,

Sapna and Thomas