Gender Equality & Inclusion Policy

Women's Light Foundation exists to advance the rights of women and girls. An organisation making that claim externally must be able to demonstrate it internally. This policy sets out how the principle applies to our own staffing, decision-making, programming and partnerships.

Our commitments align with CEDAW, the Maputo Protocol, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and SDG 5.

• Recruitment and promotion on merit, with no discrimination on grounds of sex, marital status, pregnancy, disability, ethnicity, religion or origin.
• Equal pay for work of equal value.
• Women in genuine decision-making roles, not only in delivery roles.
• A workplace free of sexual harassment, with clear reporting routes.
• Working arrangements that account for care responsibilities, which in practice fall disproportionately on women.
• Meeting times and locations set so that women can actually attend.

• Gender analysis at the design stage of every programme, not as an afterthought.
• All data disaggregated by sex, age, disability status and location, so that we can see who a programme is missing.
• Deliberate inclusion of women with disabilities, who face compounded barriers to every service.
• Engagement of men and boys as allies, because norms are held community-wide.
• Assessment of whether an intervention could increase a woman's risk within her household before it proceeds.

Persons with disabilities are named in our core value of inclusion as a priority group. In practice this means selecting accessible venues where possible, providing information in formats people can use, ensuring complaints mechanisms are reachable by people with sensory or mobility impairments, and never excluding someone from a programme on the basis of a disability that could reasonably be accommodated.

Partners are expected to maintain equivalent standards. Where a prospective partner's practice falls short, we raise it directly; where it cannot be resolved, we do not proceed. We will not lend our name to work that undermines the principles we exist to advance.