Ashoka
On 8th March, the world will mark and celebrate, as it does annually, International Women’s Day (IWD). A celebration of women’s resilience, leadership, and transformative power in society, which has always been the bedrock of progress. IWD is a global affirmation of women's dignity, rights, and essence in their multifaceted roles as mothers, homemakers, caregivers, community workers, activists, leaders, innovators, and single parents.
This IWD, we draw inspiration from Ashoka’s vision of “Everyone a Changemaker”, a world where every individual has the ability, agency and efficacy to drive positive change. Women embody this vision daily. Wherever they are and in whatever roles they assume, women act as natural and consummate changemakers, in spite of a multitude of sociocultural, systemic and entrenched challenges and constraints.
Across the globe, women navigate a shared reality of systemic exclusion. They are the primary food producers yet own less than 10% of the world's land. They perform the majority of unpaid care work, cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing, often leaving them in a state of chronic time of poverty that limits education, rest, and leadership. Their bodies and rights remain battlegrounds, with millions still subjected to child marriage, female genital mutilation, gender-based violence and restricted reproductive autonomy. When they enter politics or boardrooms, they often face discrimination, violence, scrutiny, and bias that men are spared.
And perhaps most insidiously, as has been illustrated through Ashoka Fellows, their deepest work, the slow labour of shifting mindsets and changing culture, remains unacknowledged by many funders and institutions that reward only what can be counted and seen. Ashoka, founded in 1981, is a global association of over 4000 of the world's leading social entrepreneurs who facilitate systemic change and innovate solutions to many of the world's socioeconomic problems. Ashoka’s array of programs provides tools and frameworks for cultivating cultures, mindsets, and competencies for changemaking.
These are not isolated struggles; they are the collective weight women experience, every day, in every country. If we want women to succeed, and if we want the communities and countries that depend on them to thrive, we must move beyond generic support. We must provide support that is tailored to their lived reality and their experience and perspective of driving change. At the core is pervasive gender bias and discrimination, which manifests in investors questioning their commitment, people taking them less seriously, and professional environments that are simply not designed for them. These bias fuels their exclusion from networks and partnerships, cutting women off from the mentorship and funding introductions.
Compounding this, many support systems meant to help are often mismatched, excelling at technical training like financial literacy and business plans while overlooking skills like networking, negotiation, self-efficacy and storytelling, which builds their ability to pitch and negotiate. Africa has one of the highest rates of female entrepreneurship in the world, yet women-led social businesses remain disproportionately smaller, underfunded, and constrained.
Recognizing these barriers and challenges, and the critical role of women social entrepreneurs the Women's Initiative for Social Entrepreneurship (WISE) was launched in 2011 by Ashoka Arab World. WISE was built on the foundational insight that women innovators often lead differently, prioritizing the transformation of cultural norms rather than quantitative outputs. Ashoka's 2018 Global Impact Study validated this, revealing that 76% of women social entrepreneurs surveyed focus on shifting societal attitudes as core to their strategy.
WISE has successfully elected dozens of women Fellows, building a thriving "ChangemakHERS" community, fostering cross-border collaborations through targeted grants and amplifying the stories of women innovators through its WorldWISE Storytelling Project. It hosts and engages ecosystem stakeholders in its Get WISER Summit, and its impact illustratesthat when you redefine success to include women's leadership and perspective, you unlock a powerful wave of systemic change. Most powerfully, WISE connects over 1,800 women Fellows across 90 countries, creating a global movement where women in Cameroon can learn from women in Indonesia, and where the lessons from South Africa can inspire change in Egypt, and vice versa.
WISE’s most distinctive departure from traditional programs is its method across three dimensions of scaling defined as:
- Scaling Out: Reaching more people.
- Scaling Up: Changing policies and systems.
- Scaling Deep: Transforming mindsets, norms, and culture, the critical work that changes systems.
Through towhalls with funders and policymakers, WISE advocates for funding models that reward long-term cultural change and mind shifts. This advocacy has already influenced partners like the Ursula Zindel Hilti Foundation to allocate resources specifically for scaling deep initiatives.
Across the globe, other innovative models are also demonstrating that when support is designed around women's realities, the results are incrementally transformative. Tailored financial products, peer networks and mentorship to combat the isolation that stifles ambition, paired with capacity-building that respects lived experience, recognizing that women entrepreneurs need to be empowered for their needs, in their realities, for their success. Support must focus on the whole person and should include safe spaces where women social entrepreneurs can share, heal, and grow, and be seen, because having a community to share feeds the courage to lead. We are stronger together. The call to the ecosystem is:
- Invest in Scaling Deep
Develop frameworks to track shifts in attitudes, reduced stigma, and increased agency. Measure what matters. - Challenge Social Norms.
Through education, advocacy, and the engagement of community gatekeepers, dismantle the restrictive patriarchal driven norms that hold women back. - Amplify Female Role Models.
Ensure balanced media coverage so that young girls can see themselves as future leaders, and society begins to normalize women in power. - Build Bridges.
Connect social innovation with corporate strategy. Ensure that the people most affected by problems are trusted to design the solutions. - Create Safe Spaces.
Prioritize women's well-being and mental health. Recognize that changemaking is emotionally taxing work, and that support must address the whole person.
Today, on this IWD, and every day, let's commit to this call! This work needs all of us, women and men, funders and practitioners, global institutions and local communities. Let us support initiatives, structures and programs that ensure women have the resources, recognition, safety and community they need. Because when women lead, they don't just change policies. They open minds. They soften hearts. They shift cultures. They dismantle barriers, evoke collective power, and they are the change we want to see. And in doing so, they build a world where everyone can be a changemaker!
"We don't just want a seat at the table. We want to redesign the table, so it values the way we lead." Dr. Iman Bibars, Ashoka Vice President, Regional Director Ashoka Arab World, Founder of WISE