Unpaid caregiving in Sierra Leone significantly hampers gender equity, particularly in Freetown, where women and girls bear a disproportionate burden within households. Due to the time-intensive nature of caregiving responsibilities, women work 1.6 times more than men, encompassing both paid and unpaid work. This time poverty restricts their opportunities for education, well-being, and economic advancement, while also leaving them vulnerable to sexual violence.

The care economy is a critical, yet often underfunded and undervalued, sector that encompasses paid and unpaid care work. It includes activities related to caregiving for children, the elderly, and people with disabilities, as well as domestic work.

The Girls Opportunity Alliance (GOA) is a program of the Barack Obama Foundation, which strives to raise awareness of the importance of girls' education by giving a platform to grassroots initiatives from the Global South to share their work, and funding girl’s education projects, particularly in Africa.

The potential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on girls’ education and wellbeing are numerous and diverse. Most directly, many schools in South and Southeast Asia and the Pacific closed for extended periods, and large numbers of children were unable to access distance learning opportunities.

As Sub-Saharan Africa recovers from the economic and social impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, investing in sustainable and scalable solutions to women’s economic empowerment presents a critical opportunity to ‘build back better’.

CGAP’s three-year project on Digital Financial Services (DFS) Distribution Networks sought to enable key stakeholders in six focus countries (Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Morocco, Cote d’Ivoire, Colombia) to leverage existing knowledge about Cash-in and Cash-out (CICO) networks in rural areas, where most of the financially excluded people still live, with a view to enabling more rural customers to access and use digital financial services.

The period of late adolescence and early adulthood is a significant one, which profoundly influences future potential.

Adolescent girls often experience significant barriers to economic empowerment due to social norms which limit their power to make and act on economic decisions in order to enhance their broader well-being and position in society.

Kore Global were contracted by the British Council in 2021 to undertake comprehensive gender analyses of the education sector in 5 countries in South Asia.

Kore Global has worked in partnership with The Asia Foundation for the past two years to build country staff research capacity in several South East Asia countries, with a focus on qualitative research on gender equality and social inclusion in urban settings, and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the lives of vulnerable groups.

Canada’s International Development Research Centre, in partnership with the Soros Economic Development Fund at the Open Society Foundations, has provided a grant to Kore Global to lead a research consortium to map out, profile and systematically review care economy business models in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia.

Kore Global partnered with UNICEF, Volta Capital and the GenderSmart Investing team to assess the role that private capital can play in reducing the gendered barriers that adolescent girls and young women face on their pathways from education to employment.

The “Women and Money” programme, implemented by IDEO.org, has begun to answer “the how” of introducing Digital Financial Services (DFS) into the lives of women: how to build trust with them; how to encourage them access to digital financial services; and how accounts and payments can have a positive impact on their lives.

Kore Global worked together with Lion’s Head Global Partners to conduct a global and country-specific (Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa) landscaping analysis and feasibility assessment of gender bonds for FSD Africa.

Kore Global has worked with Women Deliver to develop a global theory of change (2021-2025), four corresponding tactical theories of action based on advocacy theory, a results framework and organisational MEL tracker.

Kore Global worked together with The Global Centre for Gender Equality at Stanford University (under a Gates Foundation grant) in 2019 and 2020 to conduct an extensive study on women’s economic empowerment policies, programs, research and data in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.