Our passionate team of social entrepreneurs founded W4 in response to the urgent global need to protect girls’ and women’s human rights and to unleash the huge potential benefits—for everyone—of accelerating girls’ and women’s empowerment.
Of the hundreds of millions of people living in extreme poverty today (less than $1.90 per day), most are girls and women. Moreover, girls and women are disproportionately affected by violations of their human rights. This undermines their capacity to live dignified, healthy and fulfilling lives and diminishes the potential wellbeing of their families and communities—with devastating effects on individuals and whole societies.
We created W4 because we believe that, through global collaboration, we can turn this situation around.
An abundance of possible solutions already exist. W4 connects the dots to bring these solutions to life:
- Across the world, grassroots organizations are doing crucial work at the local level (with a bottom-up, community-driven approach to development) to improve the welfare and life prospects of girls and women and their families. To extend their outreach and help more people, more effectively, these groups need financial and organizational support.
- Education and microfinance are immensely powerful tools for alleviating poverty and improving the welfare of all girls and women. Schooling, vocational training, opportunities for sustainable livelihoods, access to healthcare and to Information and Communication Technologies—all of these can change, and indeed save, the lives of girls and women, while positively transforming their families and communities.
- Everywhere, there are people full of goodwill. People want to make a positive difference. And they can—not only through financial giving, but also by sharing their energy, time, talents and expertise. W4 harnesses this global capacity: anyone and everyone can get involved (through even the smallest of gestures) and contribute to big, sustainable change.
W4 connects caring people to co-create opportunities for girls and women, their families and communities, everywhere. We believe in a virtuous spiral of altruism: together, we can make a better world.
