Live totals for the Women’s Empowerment Fund, updated continuously from the Race for Impact fundraising platform.
If today's total were distributed evenly across the three Women’s Empowerment interventions, here's the impact. Thank you
Funds raised by Race for Impact athletes help power a fund of three of the world's most effective women’s empowerment interventions. Each has been independently evaluated for cost-effectiveness, quality of evidence, and capacity to deploy additional funding into real impact.
Examples are illustrative. Race for Impact retains discretion on charity selection and to allocate funds within each cause-area fund, guided by impact, independent advisors, and current evidence. Impact metrics are based on cost-effectiveness data from external researchers.
Violence against women and girls is one of the most pervasive and underfunded crises in global development. The Life You Can Save notes that nearly one third of women and girls aged 15 and older have experienced physical or sexual violence globally, with around 13% experiencing violence in any given year. Violence is among the top three to five leading causes of death for young women aged 15 to 29, and directly causes 70,000 deaths annually. Despite this, the cause remains critically underfunded relative to its scale.
CEDOVIP is a locally-led, Uganda-based nonprofit that exists to change that. Founded in 2000 and operating throughout Kampala and northern Uganda, CEDOVIP runs community-led programmes focused on shifting the gender norms and attitudes that allow violence to persist.
The Life You Can Save identifies CEDOVIP's key strengths as proximate leadership, respect for dignity, and systems strengthening. CEDOVIP is currently active in 15 districts within Uganda, with ambitions to scale nationally.
CEDOVIP's primary programme is SASA!, a community mobilisation model. According to The Life You Can Save, trained activists work with individuals, couples, communities, and local governments to drive change in gender norms and attitudes, supported by evidence-based toolkits, frameworks, and technical assistance. The programme is community-driven and adapted to the local Ugandan context.
The SASA! model deploys four types of activists in each community: community activists, Ssengas (traditional marriage counsellors), drama groups, and community-based organisations, as described in Michaels-Igbokwe et al. (BMC Public Health, 2016). All activists participate on a volunteer basis, receiving no stipends. This builds a core of community members with the skills to continue disseminating SASA! messaging beyond the life of any single funded intervention, and is a key reason the model's costs remain low.
The Life You Can Save notes that CEDOVIP has influenced parliamentary approval of the Domestic Violence Bill in Uganda, and coordinates a Learning Centre in collaboration with Raising Voices that provides more than 300 activists and practitioners per year with practical skills in violence prevention. According to The Life You Can Save, SASA! as implemented by CEDOVIP has been validated through internal evaluations and several randomised controlled trials.
Community-based social empowerment programmes that shift gender norms have strong evidence behind them. The Life You Can Save cites studies from renowned researchers finding that such programmes can achieve 30 to 50% reductions in violence in communities, with effects that persist for many years. These are general findings about the model type. For CEDOVIP specifically, The Life You Can Save reports a 52% reduction in violence against women and girls in communities where CEDOVIP operates.
The original SASA! cluster randomised controlled trial provides the cost-effectiveness foundation for the model (published in BMC Public Health). The trial estimated approximately 1,201 cases of past year physical intimate partner violence averted. The cost per case of past year physical intimate partner violence averted was USD 460, and the annual cost of supporting one activist was approximately USD 389. These figures describe the SASA! intervention model as tested in the trial, not CEDOVIP's current programme at scale, but they establish why donors can have confidence in the approach CEDOVIP is built on.
The Life You Can Save notes that while the Ugandan government is broadly supportive of CEDOVIP's work, it is unlikely to fund national or nonprofit violence prevention programmes. Without donor support, this work does not happen.
When it comes to CEDOVIP's own cost-effectiveness, The Life You Can Save estimates that for every USD 150 donated, one woman lives a year of her life free from violence. The USD 21 cost per person reached comes from the SASA! trial data published in BMC Public Health, and reflects the cost of reaching one person across the full course of the intervention. CEDOVIP is led entirely by local staff and volunteers, keeping costs low and ensuring cultural legitimacy.
CEDOVIP has supported nearly 200,000 women and trained nearly 200 groups through the SASA! Programme (The Life You Can Save). The programme has achieved a 52% reduction in violence against women and girls in communities where it operates. CEDOVIP is active in 15 districts and is scaling nationally.
Every fifth maternal death in the world occurs in Nigeria, according to Giving What We Can. A Nigerian woman faces a lifetime risk of dying from pregnancy-related complications of 1 in 22. Yet the barrier is rarely a shortage of contraceptives. Modern contraception is freely available in many parts of Nigeria. The barrier is information: deeply embedded misconceptions, including the widespread fear that contraceptives cause infertility or cancer, prevent women from using methods that are safe, effective, and freely available to them, according to FEM's 2023 Annual Report. According to Giving What We Can, lack of knowledge is among the top reasons for contraceptive non-use in Nigeria.
Family Empowerment Media was founded in 2020 to close this knowledge gap. Incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship, FEM is an evidence-driven nonprofit that uses radio to deliver clear, accurate, and culturally sensitive information about modern contraception to large audiences across Nigeria. Founders Pledge recommends FEM because mass media programmes for family planning have an unusually strong evidence base, FEM is highly data-driven, and the charity has significant potential to scale. According to FEM's 2023 Annual Report, FEM set out to reach 30 million people with life-saving information in ten years. In just three years since founding, they had already reached 32 million.
FEM broadcasts two types of content: short informational ads of one to two minutes, broadcast ten times per day seven days a week, and longer shows of 20 to 30 minutes broadcast six times a week, including expert interviews, first-person narratives, and listener Q&As. All content is reviewed by religious leaders, state Ministries of Health, and medical authorities before airing, and is branded as brought to the audience by the state Ministry of Health in partnership with FEM. This institutional endorsement is a deliberate design choice that increases credibility and uptake. Content is produced following formative research with communities: in 2023, FEM conducted 176 in-depth interviews and 1,314 surveys with women and men across thirteen states to understand the drivers and barriers to contraception in each region.
Founders Pledge notes that FEM strategically targets regions with high contraceptive availability but low awareness, where the information gap is the binding constraint rather than supply. In 2023 alone, FEM reached 27.1 million listeners and signed memoranda of understanding with Ministries of Health in three new states. FEM has also developed proprietary technology that enables genuine randomisation of listeners into control and treatment groups, achieving a 97% content replacement rate across five consecutive weeks, forming the basis of a forthcoming rigorous RCT of the programme's impact.
The evidence for radio-based family planning campaigns is strong. Founders Pledge cites a randomised controlled trial of a comparable campaign in Burkina Faso, which found a reduction in rates of unplanned pregnancy of approximately 7.47%. For FEM specifically, the 2021 pilot in Kano State reached 5.6 million listeners up to 870 times over three months. According to Giving What We Can, in a time period overlapping with the intervention, contraceptive uptake in Kano rose by 75%, corresponding to 250,000 new contraceptive users. This is an observational finding from the pilot rather than a randomized control trial result, and FEM is preparing a full randomised trial to establish causality with greater precision.
The broader benefits extend well beyond maternal health. Founders Pledge notes that evidence suggests increased contraceptive use enables women to stay in school longer and increase their earnings. Longer birth intervals are associated with improvements in infant health. Allowing women to time pregnancies also reduces the burden of complications including fistula, obstetric emergencies, postpartum anaemia, and postpartum depression.
Founders Pledge estimates FEM's work in northern Nigeria to be up to 22 times as cost-effective as unconditional cash transfers when considering the impact on maternal health.
According to FEM's 2023 Annual Report, in 2023 alone FEM reached 27.1 million listeners, empowered an estimated 38,400 people to achieve their family planning intentions, saved an estimated 335 lives or equivalents in disability-adjusted life years, and generated 65,200 couple years of protection from unplanned pregnancy. Since founding, FEM has reached approximately 35 million people across Nigeria through short and long campaigns, and has completed proof of concept projects in the DRC, Niger, and Benin (Giving What We Can). FEM is currently preparing to launch its randomized control trial across additional states in Nigeria.
A woman in Nigeria is 200 times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than a woman in Sweden, according to Lafiya. Each year, approximately 40,000 Nigerian women die from pregnancy-related causes and 3 million unintended pregnancies occur. Lafiya notes that 8.8 million Nigerian women currently have an unmet need for family planning, and 24% of married Nigerian women want contraception but cannot access it. The tragedy is that effective contraception already exists. The problem is getting it to the women who need it most.
Lafiya was founded to solve this last-mile delivery problem. Operating in rural northwestern Nigeria, Lafiya identifies left-behind communities with high unmet need for family planning, trains and supervises government-employed female health workers called Lafiya Sisters in family planning counselling, and provides modern contraceptives free of charge. The focus is on a self-injectable contraceptive that is compact, discreet, requires no refrigeration, and provides protection for three months per dose. Lafiya Sisters meet women where they are: at home. Since signing cost-sharing agreements with the governments of Sokoto and Kebbi states, Lafiya is actively integrating its model into the national health system as a pathway to sustainable scale.
As described by Lafiya, its model operates in four connected stages. First, Lafiya identifies remote communities in northwestern Nigeria where unmet need for family planning is highest. Second, it trains and supervises existing government-employed female health workers, the Lafiya Sisters, in evidence-based family planning counselling and in the administration and distribution of specific contraceptives. Third, Lafiya Sisters conduct proactive home visits, providing counselling on the full range of contraceptive options and offering specific contraceptives free of charge to women who choose it. Women who prefer to self-inject are provided with up to four doses to take home, following Nigerian government approval in 2024 for at-home self-injection distribution. Fourth, Lafiya Sisters record all healthcare interactions using a digital data tool, feeding real-time service data back to state governments to inform demand forecasting and supply planning.
According to Rethink Priorities, as self-injection rates among clients increase, the productivity of each Lafiya Sister improves, allowing the programme to reach more women at lower cost per dose. The cost per dose of the specific contraceptive is currently USD 0.85, procured from Pfizer. Based on Lafiya's own budget projections, the total cost per contraceptive delivered, including all programme costs, is approximately USD 3.49.
Rethink Priorities conducted a detailed cost-effectiveness analysis of Lafiya's intervention in 2025. The analysis found a mean cost of approximately USD 23 per unintended pregnancy averted at the beginning of 2025, falling to approximately USD 12 per unintended pregnancy averted by the end of 2026 as the programme scales. In multiples of unconditional cash transfers, Rethink Priorities estimates the intervention reaches 42 times the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers by end of 2026.
A field study conducted in Sokoto State from 2024 to 2025, cited by Lafiya, used a difference-in-differences design and found that Lafiya increased contraceptive uptake from 2% to 56% in eight months, representing a statistically significant 39 percentage point increase. At 18-month follow-up, uptake had reached 72%. These figures demonstrate that Lafiya is reaching women the health system was not reaching and changing their behaviour at scale.
Rethink Priorities notes that the modelled benefits are conservative: the analysis excludes multiple categories of additional benefit, including education outcomes, household wealth improvements, female economic empowerment, and societal benefits, all of which are plausible and well-supported in the literature. Rethink Priorities models the near-term cost-effectiveness of Lafiya's intervention across 2025 and 2026. The analysis projects a mean cost of USD 23 per unintended pregnancy averted in Q1 2025, falling to USD 12 by Q4 2026 as the programme scales. The modelled cost per death averted falls from USD 912 in Q1 2025 to USD 488 by Q4 2026. These projections place Lafiya among the most cost-effective interventions available to donors in global health.
As of March 2026, Lafiya has reached over 450,000 women in northern Nigeria, trained more than 470 existing government midwives, nurses, and community health workers as Lafiya Sisters, distributed over 1 million doses of DMPA-SC, and established a presence across more than 200 government health facilities. 83% of users report continuous use. 48% of all Lafiya clients are first-time contraceptive users, confirming that the programme is reaching women who were previously unserved. Lafiya has signed cost-sharing agreements with the governments of Sokoto and Kebbi states, and targets further government partnerships as part of its path to sustainable national scale.
Talks, films and interviews from the people running these programmes. Hear the work in their own words.