Even a Little is Too Much to Ask

Happy International Women's Day! ♀️

This year's theme is #GiveToGain, placing a focus on reciprocity and support. In the impact and social entrepreneurship space, both these things are essential — and their absence can quickly become very detrimental. Our work and lived experiences, as an all-female team in the raw materials and electronics circularity space, are sadly a good example of this.

We have run The E-Waste Column for 4 years, reaching upwards of 47 000 people each year with our free weekly column. Through The E-Waste Learning Hub, we have also made over 130+ short-format modules easily accessible, offering reduced rates and even free access to cater to different users’ financial situations.

Our learning resources are used by students, jobseekers, professionals, and citizens to learn about raw materials, e-waste, circularity, and the just transition. We have closed a key gap in education and knowledge management in this way. This landed us on The Bloom’s 30 Under 30 Social Impact list in December 2024 and led us to become a stakeholder in UNIDO’s Global Electronics Management (GEM) programme in September 2025.

Our whole project needs €20 000 of (external) funding yearly to operate, meaning that the cost per user educated through our project is currently under €0,43. The costs of this used to be funded through Palsa & Pulk's consultancy work, and therewith we were self-funding and bootstrapping all of our educational work for years. In the wake of the Omnibus proposals to the EU's Green Deal, funding this work entirely ourselves is however sadly no longer possible.

In light of this, we have been looking for external funding to close our funding gap for over 12 months now. This has sadly been without any success. We are therefore slowly but surely running out of the financial means to keep all our operations and resources going.

The irony in all of this is that we still often hear that “it must be a great time to be working on raw materials as women in the EU”. While it is true that there is a lot of funding available to projects on raw materials in the EU (we are talking about billions of euros here) and the EU has put various KPIs in place with the aim of increasing gender equality within the raw materials sector and the projects it funds, we can honestly only say that we have never received any funding or any type of meaningful support from the EU, its various institutions, or any national governments in Europe.

All of this is to say that what should theoretically be happening (or what needs to be happening) to advance gender equity and what happens in practice often remain two distinctly different things. Our female-led educational project might sadly just end up being one of the very many casualties of this because at the end of the day, only that what is funded can exist. And it turns out that, as a group of women in the EU in 2026, €20 000 – or even just €0,43 – is still just too much to ask.

#WomensDay #IWD2026