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Anne Marie Golla

ICRW Experts to Attend Clinton Global Initiative

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President Sarah Degnan Kambou and economist Anne Golla participate in annual gathering
Fri, 09/21/2012
By Gillian Gaynair

ICRW President Sarah Degnan Kambou on Sept. 25 will facilitate a discussion about the importance of investing in women and girls during the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) in New York.

International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) President Sarah Degnan Kambou on Sept. 25 will facilitate a discussion about the importance of investing in women and girls during the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) in New York. ICRW’s Anne Golla, a senior economist, also will attend the three-day event. 

Kambou advises CGI on cross-cutting gender issues. Established in 2005 by President Bill Clinton, CGI convenes a community of global leaders to craft solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. Each year, CGI members make commitments to take action on certain issues. 

The theme of this year’s event centers on how to collectively design a world to create more opportunity and equality. Specifically, CGI will explore how individuals can be empowered to create a better future, how investments can provide healthy, sustainable environments to live, work and learn, and how to create systems that ensure opportunity and prosperity for all in an increasingly interconnected world. 

As is always the case at CGI, empowering and involving women and girls in efforts to address global issues will continue to take center stage. 

Indeed, that will be the case when Kambou facilitates the “Uncovering the Multiplier Effect of Investing in Women” session. The discussion will examine how rigorous evaluation of investments in women is key to helping foundations and philanthropists uncover the larger community impact of their investments. 

Participating in the discussion will be Afshan Khan, chief executive officer of Women for Women International, which supports women survivors of war; and Timothy A. A. Stiles, global chair of International Development Assistance Services at KPMG, a global network of professional firms providing audit, tax and advisory services. 

Meanwhile, Golla on Sept. 25 will participate in a session focused on integrating women into global supply chains. Golla has particular expertise in women’s employment and entrepreneurship and measuring women’s economic empowerment. 

ICRW and CGI:

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Understanding and Measuring Women's Economic Empowerment

Understanding and Measuring Women's Economic Empowerment
Definition, Framework and Indicators

Anne Marie Golla, Anju Malhotra, Priya Nanda and Rekha Mehra
2011

Economically empowering women is essential both to realize women’s rights and to achieve broader development goals such as economic growth, poverty reduction, health, education and welfare. But women’s economic empowerment is a multifaceted concept so how can practitioners, researchers and donors design effective, measurable interventions?

This brief report lays out fundamental concepts including a definition of women’s economic empowerment; a measurement framework that can guide the design, implementation and evaluation of programs to economically empower women; and a set of illustrative indicators that can serve as concrete examples for developing meaningful metrics for success.

(1.77 MB)

We encourage the use and dissemination of our publications for non-commercial, educational purposes. Portions may be reproduced with acknowledgment to the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW). For questions, please contact publications@icrw.org; or (202) 797-0007.

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Measuring Women’s Economic Empowerment

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ICRW Defines Concepts and Indicators as Guidance
Fri, 09/16/2011
By Gillian Gaynair

No single program can address every underlying influence in the process to economically advance women. Instead, those working in global economic development should choose an area within the process where they can make the most difference – and measure its impact.

No single program can address every underlying influence in the process to economically advance women. Instead, those working in global economic development should choose an area within the process where they can make the most difference – and measure its impact, according to an upcoming paper by the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW).

Scheduled to be released in October, the brief paper defines women’s economic empowerment and provides a framework developed by ICRW to guide the design, implementation and evaluation of economic advancement programs. The framework is built on concepts that ICRW experts gathered from existing literature and from their experience of integrating economic empowerment for women into programs and evaluating it.

“An increasing number of governments, corporations and donor organizations recognize that women’s involvement in the global marketplace is critical to alleviating poverty,” said Anne Marie Golla, a senior economist and evaluation specialist at ICRW. “But it became clear to us that many are unsure how to determine whether their work – and investments – are indeed economically empowering women.”

“We believe ICRW’s framework will help provide some guidance to practitioners, donors and other researchers working on the issue,” she said.

However, Golla stressed that for a woman living in impoverished conditions to arrive at a point where she is armed with the ability to make her own financial decisions and succeed economically, is a complex, multidimensional process. With that, “There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to ensure the success of programs that focus on and want to measure women’s economic empowerment,” she said. “It depends on the context in which you’re working and which underlying factors that contribute to women’s empowerment you’re trying to address.”

Those factors vary, according to ICRW’s paper. They can include the resources available to help a woman prosper, such as skills training and loans, to the institutions that determine how those resources reach her, such as legal bodies. Each is an influential element on a woman’s path to economic empowerment.

The key to creating meaningful economic empowerment programs is to select a slice of this complex economic empowerment process where the most impact can be made – given the project timeframe and funding – and concentrate on that. ICRW also recommends that the project’s evaluation should align with the particular slice it chooses to address.

To provide more guidance, ICRW offers within its measurement framework several examples of indicators of success, not only at the individual and household levels but at the community and institutional levels, too.

“Measuring women’s economic empowerment is akin to measuring outcomes for poverty reduction,” noted Anju Malhotra, ICRW’s vice president of research, innovation and impact and a co-author of the paper. “It’s a complex process, but it can and should be measured.”

Gillian Gaynair is ICRW’s senior writer and editor.

ICRW's report, Understanding and Measuring Women's Economic Empowerment, is available for download.

Measuring Women's Economic Empowerment

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Women’s economic empowerment is critical for reducing poverty and achieving broader health and development objectives. However, there is limited evidence on how programs can economically empower women and which measures can be used to know whether programs are effective.  

ICRW, with funding from the U.K. Department for International Development, created a conceptual framework for measuring women’s economic empowerment that takes into account their capacity to earn income as well as their ability to make decisions and control resources.

The framework reflects the latest thinking on economic empowerment, ICRW’s experience and discussions ICRW had with staff and participants during site visits to economic development programs in Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Laos and Nepal. The framework also incorporates feedback from a workshop that ICRW convened with donors, multilateral institutions and implementing partners to discuss the applicability of the framework for measuring women’s economic empowerment.

Duration: 
2010 – 2011
Location(s): 
Bangladesh
Location(s): 
Cambodia
Location(s): 
India
Location(s): 
Laos
Location(s): 
Nepal
Related Publications: 
Understanding and Measuring Women's Economic Empowerment

Evaluating a Media Campaign to Encourage Savings

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Savings can be a powerful tool for poor women to escape poverty. But low-income women often are unaware of formal savings methods and their advantages. And women feel the need to secretly manage their finances because of gender power imbalances over the control of household income.

Can a television drama encourage low-income women to establish sound savings habits with formal financial institutions? ICRW is working with a consortium of partners in the Dominican Republic, including Women’s World Banking and Puntos de Encuentro, to launch and evaluate an innovative mass media campaign to improve perceptions about formal saving mechanisms and to encourage open dialogue between women and men about their financial habits. The project’s centerpiece is a 20-episode telenovela that will focus on the financial behaviors of couples and how they work toward more cooperative financial management. The television program will be complemented by an advertising campaign for specific savings products geared toward low-income women.

ICRW will conduct a rigorous evaluation of the program, measuring women’s awareness and opinions of formal saving methods and whether men and women discuss household finances before, during and after the campaign in order to determine what changes the program has caused.

Duration: 
2010-2013
Location(s): 
Dominican Republic
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