There is a proverb — give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach a person to fish and you feed them for life. In the context of global poverty, the more precise version might be this: invest in women's ability to fish, own the land around the lake, access credit to build a boat, and keep the income they earn from the catch — and you change the trajectory of entire communities for generations.

Women Thrive Worldwide built two decades of advocacy on exactly this premise. Former president Ritu Sharma, who documented the evidence base in her book Teach a Woman to Fish: Overcoming Poverty Around the Globe, spent years arguing that gender-neutral development policy is not actually neutral at all — it systematically disadvantages women because it fails to account for the structural barriers they face.

The Paradox at the Heart of Global Poverty

Here is the central paradox of women and global food security: the people who grow most of the world's food are the least likely to eat enough of it. Women farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia produce an estimated 60–80% of food for household consumption. They manage the planting, the harvesting, the storage, the preparation. And yet women represent the majority of the world's 733 million chronically hungry people.

The gap is not explained by ability, effort, or productivity. It is explained by access. Women have significantly less access to land ownership, fertiliser, improved seeds, irrigation, agricultural credit, training, and market information. When women do have access to the same productive resources as men, they produce comparable yields. The problem is that they almost never do.

"Less than 15 per cent of agricultural landholders globally are women. Closing the gender gap in farm productivity could increase global GDP by approximately 1 per cent — nearly a trillion dollars."

— UN Women, Facts and Figures: Economic Empowerment

The numbers compound. Women make up 43% of the agricultural labour force in developing countries. They earn less for the same work. They are more likely to be working in subsistence farming rather than commercial agriculture. They have less access to markets and transportation. And 700 million fewer women than men are in paid work at all — held back by a combination of unpaid care responsibilities, legal restrictions, and structural discrimination that remains embedded in land tenure, banking systems, and labour law across most of the world.

The Case for Women-Centred Development

The evidence base for investing in women is now substantial enough that it should not require argument. And yet it continues to require argument, because the funding does not follow the evidence.

Here is what the research consistently shows:

Food security multiplier
When women control household income, they spend a higher proportion on food, healthcare, and children's education than men in comparable circumstances. The benefits are intergenerational.
Agricultural productivity
If women farmers had equal access to land, credit, and inputs, agricultural output in developing countries could increase by 2.5–4%, reducing the number of hungry people by 100–150 million.
Children's outcomes
Women's income increases investment in children's education and health. Children of economically empowered mothers show better nutrition, higher school attendance, and lower rates of early marriage.
Community resilience
Communities with higher female economic participation recover faster from shocks — climate events, conflict, economic crises. Women's networks and savings groups provide informal social protection.
Business multipliers
Women-owned businesses employ more women and reinvest more locally than male-owned businesses of comparable size. Female entrepreneurship creates employment multipliers in communities.
Violence reduction
Economic independence reduces women's vulnerability to intimate partner violence. Women with their own income have greater ability to leave abusive relationships and fewer barriers to seeking help.

The Promise and Limits of Microfinance

In 1983, Muhammad Yunus founded Grameen Bank in Bangladesh with a radical hypothesis: that poor women were creditworthy — that if you gave them small loans with reasonable terms, they would repay them, invest them productively, and become economically self-sufficient. The hypothesis proved correct. By 2020, the global microfinance market had reached $156.7 billion, serving 211 million customers — the majority of them women in developing countries.

Microfinance has genuine achievements to its name. The World Bank's Women Entrepreneurship Development Project in Ethiopia, which provided microloans and training to women business owners between 2012 and 2024, saw average client income grow by 67% and the number of employees per firm grow by 58%. Across the programme, over 27,000 women secured loans to start or expand businesses.

But the microfinance movement has also produced cautionary lessons. When interest rates are predatory — and in some cases they have exceeded 100% — microloans trap women in cycles of debt rather than lifting them out of poverty. When loan programmes are not accompanied by financial literacy training, market access support, and social protection, the benefits are limited. The original spirit of Grameen Bank — small loans, community accountability, social support — has too often been replaced by financial products that look like development but function like exploitation.

One billion women remain outside the formal financial system entirely. They cannot open a bank account, access credit, or save securely. That is not a gap that microloans alone can close.

Land Rights: The Fundamental Issue

If there is a single intervention that would do more to reduce poverty among women than any other, it is this: secure land rights. The ability to own, inherit, control, and legally defend the land you farm is foundational to everything else — access to credit (which requires collateral), investment in land improvement, legal protection from displacement, and the ability to pass assets to the next generation.

Fewer than 15% of agricultural landholders globally are women. In parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, the figure falls below 5%. Women farm land they do not own, under customary tenure systems that can be overridden by male relatives, or on plots that are allocated informally and withdrawn when a husband dies or leaves.

Countries that have reformed land tenure laws to give women equal rights to own and inherit property have seen measurable improvements in women's bargaining power within households, investment in children's education, and rates of intimate partner violence. Legal reform works — when it is enforced.

The Funding Gap

The UN estimates that an additional $360 billion per year is needed in developing countries to achieve gender equality and women's empowerment. To contextualise that figure: it is less than one-fifth of what the world spent on military expenditure in 2022 alone.

Currently, programmes dedicated to gender equality represent just 4% of official development assistance. The IVAWA — the International Violence Against Women Act — was designed in part to close this gap by requiring the US government to invest in gender-based violence prevention as part of its foreign assistance. Without that legislative mandate, investment remains discretionary, inconsistent, and chronically below what the evidence demands.

Women Thrive Worldwide's two decades of advocacy were built on the argument that this is not a resource problem — it is a prioritisation problem. The knowledge of what works exists. The evidence base is extensive. What has been missing is the political will to fund it at scale.