Women and girls have always been at the focus of our foundation throughout our almost 50-year history.

The Sabancı Foundation has been working with a vision of a society in which all individuals enjoy their rights equally. Women and girls especially have always been at the focus of our foundation throughout our almost 50-year history. In addition to some traditional tools such as giving scholarships, building schools and dormitories to support girls’ education, we have supported long-term projects in our Grant Programme and established strong partnerships to promote equal and active participation of women and girls in all aspects of society.

In order to maximise our impact and make it more sustainable, we started the ‘Joint Program to Promote and Protect the Human Rights of Women and Girls’ in 2006 in collaboration with ministries, local administrations, nongovernmental organizations, and the United Nations to achieve gender equality at the local level and empower the rights of women and girls. The project lasted 10 years and achieved nation-wide impact. Directorates were established in the pilot cities of the project to provide services focusing on women’s issues. Gender equality was reflected in the strategic plans and budgets of municipalities. Monitoring groups and commissions were established to track gender equality indicators. An increase in the number of women’s organizations was observed in all provinces where the program was implemented. Female drivers were employed permanently for the first time on city bus routes. It was also the first project in our country based on collaboration between the United Nations, the government, and a foundation.

This program also showed us the importance of civil society organizations to create and trigger lasting change and in line with this, we started the Sabancı Foundation Grant Program that has been continuing for 17 years. Regarding its scope and continuity, it is still the only grant program implemented by a foundation in Turkey. Within the program, we support the projects of civil society organizations on the issues of supporting girls’ education, preventing early and forced marriages and supporting women’s economic, political, and social participation. Preventing early and forced marriages is especially a critical issue for us. So far, we have implemented programs on local, national and international levels and partnered with many organizations to raise awareness on this multidimensional problem and create innovative solutions to prevent it. For the last three years, we have been working with UNFPA Turkey for the Prevention of Child Marriages project where we use the method of health mediators to inform people about the health consequences of early marriages.

I am so happy that as a result of all these efforts, our foundation was included among the top seven global foundations focused on gender equality in the OECD’s ‘Insights on Philanthropy for Gender Equality’ report published in 2019.

A new focus on NEET young women

We are currently focusing on young women aged 18 and 29 who are not in employment, education, or training (also known as NEET), a major social issue in our country and the rest of the world. Our long-term research has helped us shed light on this issue. When we delved deeper into this problem in Turkey, we saw that almost half of young women aged between 18 and 29 were in the NEET category, making Turkey the country with the highest NEET rate in Europe.

With years of experience in projects that aim to empower women and girls in all areas of life and provide access to equal opportunities, we developed the ‘Young Women Building Their Future’ project in partnership with the Ministry of Family and Social Services, the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, and the UNDP. Officially started in 2022, the project focuses on 3.5 million NEET women in Turkey, and we aim to empower them by increasing their participation in social and economic life. The project has many different components such as the ‘Opportunities Map’ that we created as a digital portal to enable young women to reach nearby job, internship and training opportunities, the mentorship program where 500 young women are matched with their mentors, awareness raising and vocational trainings in pilot cities and a special grant programme to support innovative models for NEET women. So far, 1,000 women participated in our trainings and more than 50 of them started working. I am sure we will be doing more.

The Young Women Building Their Future project is mainly developed to provide opportunities for young women to redesign their lives. Our purpose is to help change the perception of NEET women about themselves and show the opportunities around them as well as creating new ones. Yet we are also aware that empowering young women may not be enough without changing existing gender barriers and social norms. Our research has shown us that care responsibilities, lower wages for women compared to men, and the concentration of women in certain sectors and professions are among the main reasons for women to stay outside of employment. Therefore, we are also trying to raise awareness on these barriers and explore ways to increase young women’s participation in the workforce and ensure they have equal access to opportunities.

With the Young Women Building Their Future Grant Program, for which the pre-application period has recently ended, we want to support innovative local models that can be replicated in other places. Through collaborative and innovative models developed by municipalities and civil society organizations, our target is to enhance the employability of young women and facilitate their employment. We also included project applications from the cities affected by the major earthquake that occurred earlier this year in February, in addition to the pilot cities of our project.

We hope that this project will make the problems and needs of the NEET women more visible and in the long run, support young girls and women to choose their own life path. As Sabancı Foundation, we always believe in the power of collaboration and collective impact. Therefore, we also would like to make this issue visible and encourage other philanthropic organizations to have a special focus on NEET women in their work on gender equality.

Nevgul Bilsel Safkan is General Manager at the Sabancı Foundation.