WHEN’s STORY

The Women’s Health and Economic Empowerment Network (WHEN) was established to create a streamlined financial platform to align leaders from various G7 government agencies, UN institutions, private sector partners, philanthropists, academia, and other fields of expertise with a shared goal of improving women’s access to capital and healthcare across the globe. The WHEN platform designs and scales solutions with a gender lens to address challenges in health, education, agriculture, and economic inclusion.

WHEN’s mission is to help organizations achieve meaningful and sustainable outcomes by scaling their existing efforts through innovative financing mechanisms. Despite global efforts to improve gender equity and quality healthcare services in emerging markets, there remains substantial gaps in financing these policies.

WHEN is set apart by its strategic approach to sustainable funding, its holistic commitment to supporting innovative solutions for the world’s most pressing issues, and its ability to aid in identifying and sourcing alternative funding platforms. CGHD, the Secretariat of WHEN, started building and cultivating these platforms in 2017 after recognizing that many global health initiatives failed as a result of insufficient, unreliable, or unsustainable funding, especially considering the current SDG financing gap which stands at an astounding USD 3.9 trillion.

In addition to designing and scaling solutions, WHEN works to identify, leverage, and connect projects with a wide range of alternative sources for funding. This includes lending from private sector finances, angel investors, development financial institutions, venture capital firms, and philanthropists.