The IELD Global Programme addresses key causes of women's economic disempowerment through two distinct but complementary approaches to IELD interventions.

Depending on the demand from countries, and the nature of the problem, IELD can be a response to either one, or a combination of:

• Creating an enabling environment to unlock bottlenecks that hinder women and men from entering into the labor market, or engage in income generating activities; and
• Promoting investments to accelerate women’s economic empowerment, labor force participation and entrepreneurship. For both strategic approaches above, the country based intervention will have distinct clients and entry points, depending on the demand, design, and problem IELD is looking to solve. For simplicity, they can be divided into:
• Programme design and interventions focused on gender responsive Local Economic Development through local authorities and public infrastructure as responses to bottlenecks;
• Programme design and interventions focused on boosting private sector development, entrepreneurship, and integration of women into the labor market through provision of private capital investment.

In both areas of interventions, IELD aims to respond to the local needs and women’s economic empowerment through its Transformative Impact Financing (TIF) approach, which utilizes UNCDF’s local development finance instruments, to unlock domestic capital for local economic development with a particular emphasis on the development impact as a measure for success.