The Government Accountability Office (GAO) just issued its report on Ivanka Trump‘s program, Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative (W-GDP), which was developed to support female entrepreneurs with small businesses around the world.
Politico explains, “W-GDP aimed to codify gender analysis and deliver targeted finance across the women’s programs of 10 U.S. Government agencies. At the individual level, the hope was that poor women entrepreneurs would receive the financial kick-start they needed to build a business.”
Unfortunately, it sounds like the program was severely lacking.
Although 19 women’s empowerment programs were launched under the initiative, they were ultimately ineffective. United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was “unable to say what proportion of funds went to the very poor, and women-owned and managed businesses,” Politico explains.
That’s not all. Apparently, USAID was also unable to distinguish which businesses were female-led and female-owned.
Despite these unclear definitions, USAID spent $265 million per year on the initiative and the related antipoverty program.
Though this might sound like it was simply out of Trump’s hands, a 2019 interview claims the opposite. In it, Ivanka Trump promised “rigorously track the execution and efficacy of the money that we were spending,” per The New York Times.
This non-partisan report indicates that Trump did not keep that promise.
