Women’s Empowerment Fund (WEF): Overview WEF first launched in 2013 as one of the few financing mechanisms designed to scale effective business models for empowering women energy entrepreneurs. Objective: Allow clean energy enterprises to pilot innovative empowerment interventions and/or scale approaches that increase opportunities for women entrepreneurs, employees, sales agents, producers, etc. Grants of up to USD $75,000 to enterprises and NGOs working in the clean cooking and energy sector In 2014, as a part of the USDOS-funded wPOWER program, prioritized applications bundling additional non-cooking energy products Universal Best Practices to Engage Women Conduct analysis to understand community gender roles and dynamics Develop a strategy to engage men Schedule times and locations of meetings/activities around women’s availability and remain flexible Identify and build strong local partnerships with trusted individuals and organizations; Strongly consider working with women’s groups Conduct gender-sensitive trainings on relevant topics; Offer continuous training opportunities and mentorship

Women’s Empowerment Fund (WEF): Impact In Kenya, WEF catalyzed a high-performance sales team of women selling clean cookstoves through targeted recruitment and retention strategies, ultimately attracting interest of new and prospective partners for The Paradigm Project to scale as a business. In Nigeria, as a result of an empowerment and business training course for cookstove entrepreneurs, Envirofit will scale empowerment training with women distributors throughout its global operations. Envirofit plans to conduct 2 empowerment trainings with women entrepreneurs in Kenya this year, expand partnerships in Nigeria to include at least one other large women’s network, and roll out this programmatic approach in their Indian business in early In Uganda, WEF increased interest and investment of cookstove enterprises to sell directly to women, which increased demand, sales, and income for local businesses. Women purchasers saved time and money, and improved their health as a result of using cleaner cookstoves. A new network of women were also engaged as sales agents. As a result of the grant, Mercy Corps plans to apply this research methodology and lessons learned to scale the sector in other countries, such as Myanmar. In Guatemala, WEF tested an iterative, woman-centered design process for an improved institutional stove with women tortilla vendors to ensure buy-in and adoption of improved technologies.

Women’s Empowerment Fund (WEF): Impact In India, SEWA is the largest women’s network in the world with 1.93 million members across 12 states in India, and under the WEF developed and tested a mobile application- based toolkit for women entrepreneurs to use and easily demonstrate to their customers the financial benefits of purchasing and using clean cookstoves. SEWA reached 598 members during the beta testing of the mobile application, and is now poised to scale use of this toolkit throughout the SEWA women's network In Haiti, WEF supported a five-day workshop led by Alliance gender and women’s empowerment experts with grantee Fuego del Sol (FdS) and four other Haitian partners to learn how to train women energy entrepreneurs in empowerment, leadership, and business skills. Following the workshop, FdS trained 120 people (90 women, 30 men) in clean cooking solutions, and 35 of those trained (28 women, 7 men) received additional entrepreneurship and empowerment training to enhance their businesses. The grant also established two distribution hubs at local schools for clean cooking products, and 40 female school cooks were engaged as new clean cookstove and fuel entrepreneurs.