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W-GDP supporters saw it as a revolutionary whole-of-government approach to empowering women, while critics of the new law ridiculed it as too limited to make a real difference.
The plan was to mandate and codify gender analysis and provide targeted funding through the women’s programs of 10 US government agencies. At the individual level, the hope was that often poor women entrepreneurs would receive the financial boost they needed to start a business.
One of the 10 agencies involved was the United States Agency for International Development, which is mandated by WEEE law to allocate $ 265 million per year for support to micro, small and medium enterprises. Half of the money is needed to go to women, the other half to the very poor (some overlap between the two groups is expected).
While Trump has pitched W-GDP as a cohesive program “allowing us to rigorously monitor the execution and effectiveness of the money we spend,” GAO’s 14-month audit shows that at least at the USAID, the opposite is happening.
While USAID launched at least 19 new women’s empowerment programs in 2019 alone, there have been many failures in both targeting the money and measuring its impact.
USAID was unable to say what proportion of funds went to very poor, women-owned and managed businesses. Shockingly, the agency couldn’t even define what really constitutes a business owned and run by women, GAO concluded.
Ivanka Trump and her team spent two years developing the larger W-GDP program. But the White House had limited control over USAID, where a team of 20 career officials – initially known as the Office of Private Capital and Microenterprises, and later as the Private Sector Engagement Hub. – supervised the expenditure of the WEEE law. Trump’s team has held weekly and sometimes daily calls with these officials to monitor implementation.
One of Ivanka Trump’s favorite women’s empowerment anecdotes on the stages of the New York World Conference in Doha was about her efforts to empower Colombian women, whom she visited in September 2019 with the USAID Administrator Mark Green. The US and Colombian governments have gone so far as to issue a joint statement on their shared vision.
Beneath the surface there were already problems with USAID’s programs in Colombia. GAO cited USAID’s Colombian funding of a Productive Entrepreneurship for Peace program and a rural finance initiative as examples of projects with important broad inclusive goals, which also did not. plus meets the WEEE requirement to directly fund the very poor.
“USAID has not defined and is not collecting the information necessary to meet its statutory targeting requirements,” the report notes, including failing to obtain survey responses from 26 of its 47 offices in Canada. around the world on how they distributed the funding.
GAO’s six recommendations to USAID focus on establishing new internal processes that can provide “reasonable assurance” that money allocated by Congress is reaching its intended recipients.
USAID – which is now under the leadership of interim administrator Gloria Steele, while Samantha Power awaits confirmation of the appointment to lead the agency – has accepted all six recommendations. Colleen Allen, USAID’s acting deputy administrator, in a written response to the GAO report, said the agency had already partially implemented several of the recommendations and recognized the need for better early planning.
Rep. Lois Frankel (D-Fla.) And former Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.), The co-authors of the WEEE Act, did not immediately respond to POLITICO’s request for comment.
The GAO audit was based on official financial accounts and interviews with USAID staff based in 11 countries. The report notes that some of the problems related to the mismanagement of allocated funds date back to 2015, before the enactment of the WEEE law.
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