In 2016, the International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN) began exploring the nexus of economic policy, gender and extremism in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Women peace practitioners and rights activists have long been concerned by decisions made at global and national levels that at the local level impact dynamics of economic exclusion, threaten social cohesion and exacerbate vulnerabilities to radicalization. Violent extremism and state responses to it place significant economic burden on societies. In Pakistan, for example, it is estimated that the Pakistan estimates that the direct and indirect cost of the “War on Terror” between 2002 and 2016 was $118 billion.1 The members of the Women’s Alliance for Security Leadership (WASL) have consistently draw attention to this gap between policy intentions and realities on the ground. Their lived experiences of the economic dynamics in contexts affected by violent extremism, combined with desk research on the state of current policy and practice, and the multistakeholder Global Solutions Exchange (GSX)2 meeting on these issues held at the UNDP headquarters in New York in March 20173 , inform the findings of this report. In spearheading the Women’s Alliance for Security Leadership (WASL), the International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN) is committed to ensuring that the perspectives, experience and pioneering work of locally rooted women-led organizations active in preventing violent extremism by promoting peace and pluralism are heard and heeded in global settings. As a co-founder of the Global Solutions Exchange (GSX) we are also committed to enabling systematic multi-sectoral exchanges between women, youth practitioners, scholars and policy makers across countries to highlight alternative perspectives on aspects of PVE. Sometimes these exchanges are provocative as comfort zones and conventional wisdoms are challenged. Always they are productive as they inform our collective understanding of extremist violence and serve to improve our responses in policy and practice.