

Remember when “First Daughter” Ivanka Trump launched an initiative dedicated to “women’s global economic empowerment” back in 2019? The one that promised to “advance women’s access to vocational training, fuel female entrepreneurship and lift legal and social barriers that restrict our full and free economic participation.” The one that prompted an event in which Ivanka danced with a bunch of African women, a moment she probably points to whenever anyone accuses her of being racist. Right, well, apparently Trump’s Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative was a bit of a flop.
Politico reports that the legislation that propped up the W-GDP has been slammed by auditors at the Government Accountability Office. They’ve accused the U.S. Agency for International Development, which oversaw the implementation of the Women’s Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment Act of 2018, of reporting incomplete and inconsistent data and failing to define what a poor, women-owned business even was.
From Politico:
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.
One of the 10 agencies involved was the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is mandated to allocate $265 million a year for support to micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises under the WEEE Act. Half of the money is required to go to women, half to the very poor (some overlap between the two groups is expected).
While Trump touted W-GDP as a cohesive program “enabling us to rigorously track the execution and the efficacy of the money that we are spending,” the GAO’s 14-month audit demonstrates that, at least at USAID, the opposite was happening.
So… were these Inspiring Photos for naught?