When \”Supporting Women Founders\” Becomes a Donor Performance

A program officer combing AVODA’s reports for a line on women founders alone will come up empty, since we have never divided our founders by sex, so the audit that opens this piece is Oxfam’s. Oxfam checked 72 gender-marked aid projects in 2020, together worth more than US$6 billion, and two of them met all seven of the OECD’s minimum criteria for the mark. The mark’s middle score carries far more money than its top one: in 2023 and 2024, projects scored 1, where gender equality is an important objective although the project would have gone ahead without it, made up 44.1 percent of donors’ screened bilateral aid at full value, while projects scored 2, built for gender equality, made up 4.1 percent. Support for women founders turns into a performance when the score and the photograph reach the funder’s audience while the money, the hours and the follow-up stop short of her business.

Key Takeaways

Under the OECD gender marker, a whole project counts as gender-related once gender is a “significant” objective. Aid built for gender equality stayed near US$6 billion a year from 2020 to 2024 while the tagged share grew.
Oxfam checked 72 gender-marked projects worth over US$6 billion in 2020. Two met all seven OECD minimum criteria; about a quarter carried the wrong score.
In a 2025 survey of 88 support organizations in Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda and South Africa, 69% tracked “women entrepreneurs supported” and 34% tracked whether ventures still traded two to five years later.
The founder pays for the staging in hours and in her story. Ugandan women spent about 176 minutes a day on unpaid household work in 2017/18; men spent 45.
The Backstage Questions test a budget in funding terms: principal or passenger, the share reaching her business, who pays for her hours and story, and what is counted in year three.

Three scores on a reporting form

The marker was an advocates’ victory. Women’s organizations asked donors to show how much of their aid served gender equality, and the OECD built a score, 0, 1 or 2 for each project, that turned a promise into something a parliament could check.

Then the arithmetic took over. Donor Tracker notes that when the marker is applied “the whole value of a project gets counted” as gender-related, even when gender is a small component, which gives “an inflated impression” of commitment. Aid with gender equality as the principal objective sat between US$5.9 billion and US$6.5 billion a year from 2020 to 2024. Aid tagged with gender as a significant objective rose from US$50 billion to US$57.4 billion over the same years. The growth in gender aid was growth in the tag.

Oxfam went behind the tag. Aria Grabowski and Parker Essick drew the 72 projects from seven donors and scored their documents against the seven minimum criteria the OECD recommends for any marked project. Two met all seven, and the average was 3.8. About a quarter carried the wrong score, and about one project in five identified or addressed unintended negative consequences.

Read those figures as a question about audience. The marker answers a question asked in Ottawa, London and Brussels: how much of our aid is gender aid? It answers that question well. Whether any of the money reaches a woman’s stall in Mbarara is a different question, asked by a different audience.

AVODA’s own reporting is built for that first audience too. Our public figures are 1,247+ founders applied, 600+ trained and 100+ startups supported, across 18 programs in three countries. Each counts people who came through a door, and none of them yet tells a funder whether a woman’s business is still trading in year three. The Backstage Questions below apply to our own proposals before anyone else’s.

Pledges show the same pattern from a stage. The Generation Equality Forum announced US$40 billion for gender equality in Paris in 2021. By the 2024 accountability report the total had grown to US$50.3 billion pledged, with US$40.4 billion secured and US$21.9 billion spent. The economic justice and rights coalition, the one closest to women’s enterprise, reported US$30.9 billion pledged, US$27.4 billion secured and US$12.4 billion spent.

Two cautions keep that fair. Most commitment makers expect to meet their original commitments by 2026, so some of the gap between secured and spent is timing. And every figure is self-reported: 53 percent of commitment makers answered the 2024 survey, covering 71 percent of the commitments. The headline that travels is the pledge, and a pledge costs only the announcement.

Faces on the diversity page, heads in the count

Banu Ozkazanc-Pan and Susan Clark Muntean interviewed founders, investors and accelerator directors in Boston and St. Louis for Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: A Gender Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2022). In chapter 7 they look up the diversity tab of a large accelerator they call TechAccelerator, and find a page that “highlights particular founders rather than sharing data or numbers.” Each local director ran diversity work at personal discretion, with targets and metrics left unreported. They name accelerators as gatekeepers, with power over who gets in.

Chapter 8 widens the lens to development policy. Microenterprise and microlending programs, they write, carry a message that “women require empowerment, saving, and fixing,” while men appear as the financiers who do the empowering and the founders with high-growth potential. That is the casting of the performance. She plays the person being rescued, the funder plays the rescuer, and the founder who wanted a customer list gets a confidence workshop.

The authors’ remedy is accountability through numbers. Support organizations should set specific, measurable, time-bound goals and track dollars invested, entrepreneurs mentored, program participants and event attendees, all split by gender, and they should celebrate the women who succeed.

In Boston that remedy lands on a local audience. The founders, the city and the local funders can all walk into the room and see who was served. East African support organizations report upward, to a funder whose audience sits in another capital, and they already count heads.

Bridge for Billions and the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs surveyed support organizations in Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda and South Africa in 2025. Among 88 of them, the second most tracked indicator was “women entrepreneurs supported,” at 69 percent. Whether a venture was still active two to five years after the program came in at 34 percent. Nearly half follow founders to the end of the program, and 10 percent follow up after two years. Most live on short-term project grants.

The William Davidson Institute’s October 2025 report on East African support organizations, built on 35 confidential interviews, heard the same from the funding side. One donor said success is “very much focused on outputs, and it’s the number of companies here again and again.” Organizations respond with generic cohorts sized for the count, and founders report training fatigue from the same foundational content, program after program.

So the book’s power analysis travels well to Kampala and Nairobi, and its counting remedy travels badly. A gender-split headcount sent to a distant funder strengthens the very performance it was meant to check.

The bill that reaches the founder

The staging costs her in two currencies. The first is time. Uganda’s 2017/18 Time Use Survey, analyzed by Uganda’s EPRC policy institute for UN Women, found women above age 14 spending about 176 minutes a day on unpaid household work against 45 for men, and about 148 minutes socializing against 232. The averages include people who did none of that work. A two-day workshop, a pitch afternoon or a photo session draws on the hours she has least of, and the networking reception at six in the evening draws on the hours men have most of.

The second currency is her story. The European Union’s guidance for its external programs requires every recipient to acknowledge EU funding, and grants the EU a royalty-free, irrevocable license to the communication material a program produces, including the right to edit it and sub-license it. To its credit, the same guidance demands formal consent, forbids showing people as “passive or helpless victims,” and asks for stories of agency. Visibility costs are folded into the activity budget, so her photograph is paid for from the same lines as her support, and once she signs the consent form, the funder may use and adapt her story for as long as the rights last.

The Backstage Questions

Every women-founder program starts as a line in a budget, and the line shows what the photograph leaves out. Four questions read it before anyone signs, and a founder can put the same four to any program before joining it.

Principal or passenger? Is women’s enterprise the reason this money exists, scored 2 with a gender analysis in the file, or a tag riding on a project built for something else? A passenger tag can still do good, and it should be reported at its true size.
How many shillings land in her business? Count the share that reaches founders as cash, as credit on terms she can carry, or as purchase orders, and print it beside the share spent on venues, consultants, travel and visibility. The largest private item in the Generation Equality report was Procter & Gamble’s US$10 billion commitment to women-owned and women-led businesses, 89 percent of it reported as spent. Those are purchase orders, and they reach a business through its sales.
Who pays for her hours and her story? Budget childcare and transport, schedule sessions around trading hours, and treat her photograph and story as hers: optional, approved by her before publication, and paid for when a funder uses them.
What gets counted in year three? Fund long enough, and report late enough, that the indicator is whether the business still trades, earns and employs. Among the 88 organizations surveyed, 69 percent count women supported and 10 percent follow up after two years, so a year-three indicator puts a program among the few that check.

Where a gender label did change practice

Labels did real work in the development-finance evaluations Kore Global pooled in November 2025: four evaluations, covering 81 investments, from the portfolios of British International Investment, Proparco, FinDev Canada and FMO. Every one of the five top-performing investments on outcomes for women was qualified under the 2X Criteria, the gender-lens standard those investors use, and all five qualified on women’s leadership. The evaluators found that qualification pushed firms to set gender targets and build senior buy-in.

Here the critique has to give ground. Counting made this evaluation possible, and a public label hardened into practice wherever women held board and management seats with real power. A performance can become a commitment when someone checks later.

Kore’s report also sets the limits. Among the qualified investments, 69 percent landed in the middle tiers, three and four, where gains in one area sat beside weak results in others. Seven of the 81 investments qualified on the entrepreneurship criterion, women’s ownership or founding, which is the route closest to a woman founder. The sample leaned toward financial institutions, and the four investors, all founding members of the 2X Challenge, commissioned the evaluations. Kore calls qualification the floor and ties outcomes to monitoring after the deal, which is the fourth Backstage Question in the evaluators’ own words.

A lamp on a stand and a trumpet in the street

Whose eyes is a good deed for? Every section above has turned on audience, and visibility has already earned a job: the marker made promises checkable, and Kore’s evidence says a public label can harden into practice. The Sermon on the Mount holds both sides of that. Jesus tells his hearers to let their light shine “before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). A few sentences later he warns against practicing righteousness “in front of others to be seen by them,” and pictures givers who announce their gifts “with trumpets” in the streets, of whom he says they “have received their reward in full” (Matthew 6:1 to 2). Seen good deeds send the watcher’s eyes past the giver to the Father; the trumpet keeps every eye on the giver, and the applause is the whole payment. A funder whose pledge and photograph point the audience at itself has been paid already. The year-three accounts of a founder’s business, read before any brochure is printed, answer to the third audience Jesus names: “your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you” (6:4).

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the OECD gender equality policy marker?

It is a score donors attach to each aid project when reporting to the OECD. A 2 means gender equality is the principal objective. A 1 means gender is a significant objective although the project would have gone ahead anyway. A 0 means gender was screened and not targeted. Scored projects count at full value.

How can a woman founder tell whether a program is built for her or for its funder?

Ask four things before joining. Does the program exist for women’s enterprise or carry it as a side objective? How much of its budget reaches participants’ businesses? Who pays for her time, childcare and transport? Will the program still be in touch two years after graduation? Clear answers point to a program built for her.

Are success stories and photographs bad for women founders?

They help when she controls them. A story chosen, approved and paid for by the founder can win her customers. A story produced for a funder’s audience, under a license she signed to join, serves the funder first. EU guidance requires consent and dignity, so founders can ask for those terms in writing.

What should funders measure instead of women supported?

Measure what happens to the business: whether it still trades two to five years later, its revenue, its paid employees and the capital it raised. In a 2025 survey of 88 support organizations, 34 percent tracked survival at two to five years, and 10 percent followed founders up after two years.

Next Step

The shillings that reach a founder’s business can be marked on any program budget, line by line, and the share left over shows the size of the stage. Funders, designers and operators of women-founder support in East Africa can bring a current budget and results framework to a strategy call with Joshua to run the four Backstage Questions against both before the 2027 draft goes to the funder.

Sources and Evidence

Focus 2030, “Which countries support gender equality in their development aid?” (OECD DAC data, 2023 to 2024): marker definitions; US$70.8 billion a year, 4.1% principal and 44.1% significant.
Donor Tracker, “Gender equality” topic page: whole project value counted under the marker; principal-objective aid US$5.9 to 6.5 billion, significant US$50 billion to US$57.4 billion, 2020 to 2024.
Grabowski and Essick, “Are They Really Gender Equality Projects?”, Oxfam Research Report, February 2020: 72 projects, seven donors, over US$6 billion; two met all seven minimum criteria; about a quarter mis-marked.
UN Women, Generation Equality Accountability Report 2024: pledged, secured and spent totals; economic justice and rights figures; survey coverage; Procter & Gamble commitment.
Bridge for Billions and ANDE, “The Landscape of Entrepreneurship Support in Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, and South Africa” (2026): indicators tracked by 88 support organizations; follow-up rates; reliance on short-term project funding.
William Davidson Institute, “Reimagining the Future of Enterprise Support Organizations in East Africa”, October 2025: donor quote on output counts; generic cohorts and training fatigue.
European Union, “Communicating and raising EU visibility: Guidance for external actions” (July 2022, updated July 2024): acknowledgment duty, irrevocable license, consent and dignity code, visibility costs in activity budgets.
Mwesigye, “An Empirical Investigation of Gender and Time Use in Uganda”, EPRC Occasional Report 49, 2019: minutes per day by activity and gender from the 2017/18 Uganda Time Use Survey.
Kore Global, “Show me the impact! Findings and insights from DFI gender portfolio evaluations”, November 2025: 81 investments; tier results; Leadership and Entrepreneurship qualification counts; limits of the sample.
Ozkazanc-Pan and Clark Muntean, Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: A Gender Perspective, Cambridge University Press, 2022: chapter 7 (accelerator diversity pages, gatekeeping) and chapter 8 (development programs and “fixing” women; metrics remedy).
Matthew 5:16 and 6:1 to 4 (NIV), Bible Gateway: the lamp, the trumpet and the Father who sees in secret.