After a rigorous selection process that has spanned several months and attracted hundreds of applications, Spring Impact announces the 16 highly ambitious and impactful NGOs selected for the cohort of Scale Accelerator: Women’s Empowerment Programme.

Scale Accelerator: Women’s Empowerment is a fully-funded scaling consultancy programme for locally-led NGOs in southern Africa who want to scale up and take their vital work to more people, in more places. 

The programme will help participants figure out how to implement their programme, service or intervention elsewhere in a financially sustainable way. The support will be tailored to each organisation’s needs and will focus on building scaling approaches for long-term impact which retain quality and depth at scale.  

The first cohort consists of 16 dynamic and diverse organisations from Malawi, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe who are committed to addressing critical issues related to women’s empowerment, including: 

• Art in Global Health Center Africa (Malawi): An organisation working in communities of diverse nature on social behavioural change product projects, harnessing the power of the arts to nurture creative leadership and ignite bold conversations and actions.
• Bakashana (Zambia): A female-and-youth-led Grassroots Organisation, Bakashana’s primary work involves the support of young women living in rural areas who lack the financial or familial resources to attend secondary school.
• Chipembere Community Development Organization (Malawi): CCDO is a youth-led local organisation providing a holistic array of services to improve the wellbeing and livelihood of marginalised communities in rural areas of southern Malawi.
• Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (Malawi): CCJP works with partners to promote human rights, justice and peace, aiming to ensure justice happens appropriately and swiftly, to increase women’s confidence in the justice systems and to reduce future perpetration within communities.
• Graca Machel Trust (South Africa): GMT is a Pan-African organisation established in 2010 to tackle structural barriers that change how public and private institutions address women’s and children’s rights. 
• MOSAIC Training Services and Healing Centre (South Africa): An African-feminist NGO rooted in the communities it was founded in, which provides quality, holistic and integrated support services to women and children while activating resources, communities and systems, and collaborating with relevant stakeholders from government, civil society and community-based organisations, in order to prevent domestic violence and advance gender equality and safety within relationships, homes and communities. 
• Philani Maternal, Child Health and Nutrition Trust (South Africa): A non-profit organisation with programmes running in different parts of the world since 1979. In collaboration with the Western Cape Department of Health, Philani addresses family, maternal, child health and nutrition problems in the informal settlements outside Cape Town and also focuses on the prevention of chronic diseases by providing wellness services to the community.
• SAVEACT (South Africa): Based in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, SAVEACT enables communities to develop financial and enterprise development skills through belonging to savings groups. The organisation works in eight of the country’s nine provinces, with staff and partners spread out across the country.
• The Justice Desk (South Africa): A human rights non-profit organisation that specialises in human rights education, promoting children’s rights and ending gender-based violence. It was established in 2013, with the main goal of Promoting the Power of Everyday Activists.
• Theatre for a Change (Malawi): A women’s rights organisation established in 2003 that uses an innovative combination of participatory learning and drama to enable women who have been structurally marginalised and silenced to have the confidence and skills to tell their stories, and through their advocacy, make profound and lasting change to their sexual and reproductive health and rights.
• Trocaire (Malawi): A social justice organisation working with local organisations and communities to tackle the root causes of poverty, injustice, and violence, supporting people to use their own power to create positive and lasting change.
• Unjani Clinics NPC (South Africa): A non-profit organisation focussed on the empowerment of nurses and communities, with the goal of impacting millions of lives through enhanced access to quality, affordable primary healthcare. 
• WAAW (South Africa): The Working to Advance Science and Technology Education for African Women (WAAW) Foundation is an international non-profit organisation founded in 2007 that works to bridge the divide between the skills taught in African schools and the STEM and digital skills demanded by the labour market.
• Young Women in Action (Zambia): A not-for-profit, membership-based Non-Governmental Organisation established in 2002 to provide an enabling environment in which young women in Zambia can contribute towards their own empowerment and national development.
• Youth and Society (Malawi): Founded in 2012, Youth and Society (YAS) is a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) with a mission to promote and defend human rights and democratic governance in Malawi with a particular focus on young people and marginalised groups.
• Zimbabwe Women Resource Centre and Network (Zimbabwe): The Zimbabwe Women’s Resource Centre and Network (ZWRCN) is committed to promoting women’s social and economic justice in Zimbabwe and globally, through the power of information, networking, and strategic advocacy. 

Scale Accelerator: Women’s Empowerment has been developed with the ambition of enabling locally-led solutions to create even greater impact on more people, in more places. Spring Impact’s ambition is that the programme will build a movement around scaling impact, where leaders and teams across the wider NGO sector are equipped with the frameworks, tools, and networks needed to continue their own scaling journey and inspire the journeys of others into the future.