The Asia Foundation

Our operating premise is that improving social, economic, and political opportunities for women improves societies as a whole. The Asia Foundation seeks to identify change agents, build constituencies for reform around key issues affecting women’s status, and promote internal efforts to identify and solve problems.

Our programs transfer tools, strategies, and lessons learned, foster synergies, and promote cooperation within and across borders. Mobilizing women has proved powerful in order to accelerate progress in each country, through facilitating networking, coordination, and collaboration among women and women’s groups. Programs involve women at all stages, thus ensuring that issues identified and strategies utilized are appropriate to each country or region’s socio-cultural-political context. Providing linkages with like-minded allies in government and civil society and with international networks and organizations creates greater support for their efforts so that reform is promoted from within and from without. Programs are broad-spectrum and flexible, empowering women themselves to challenge the multiple causes and consequences of their subordination and discrimination, and are customized and targeted to specific country contexts.

The Foundation has decades of experience in designing and implementing innovative programs to improve women’s social, economic, and political opportunities and enhance women’s legal and human rights. Extensive in-country and regional networks, long-term relationships, and more than a decade of experience give the Foundation credibility, access, sources of innovation, and the necessary tools to complete pilot projects and larger scale interventions that can influence systems.