Strategic Communication

Savings are a powerful tool for women to improve their finances, build capital for investment and manage risk. ICRW is working in the Dominican Republic with a consortium of partners, including Women's World Banking, to encourage good savings habits and better financial management among adolescent girls.

The project includes a special savings account with the needs of girls in mind, along with a social marketing campaign to make saving fun. Special events and activities are held at bank branches to give girls positive experiences with a bank. And selected girls are offered classes through their schools to help them manage their money.

ICRW will design and implement a rigorous impact evaluation of the program activities, and also measure change around adolescent girls’ attitudes, perceptions and behaviors around savings. ICRW provides guidance for the project’s overall conceptual framework and monitoring.

ICRW is working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and its partners to strengthen their attention to gender in various agricultural projects in Africa and South Asia. ICRW reviews project designs and advises the foundation on how to address the distinct issues that affect the work of women and men farmers. ICRW also guides implementing organizations on ways to improve outreach to women farmers.

For example, ICRW provided recommendations to TechnoServe in Kenya and Tanzania in an effort to increase the incomes of small-scale farmers by improving the quality of their coffee in order to sell it in global markets. ICRW’s recommendations included approaches to guarantee that women benefit from the program along with men - such as having full membership in farmers’ cooperatives - increasing their leadership opportunities, and receiving payment for their labor on the coffee crop.

ICRW worked with Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), the German development agency, and its private sector partners with helping cotton farmers in sub-Saharan Africa increase their yields and improve the quality of their crops. ICRW assessed all aspects of the project to ensure that men and women equally benefit from project services, and that women are paid for their labor.

By collaborating with private ginning companies and cotton producer associations, the project is providing farmers access to resources such as fertilizer and pesticides, as well as farming and business training to help increase the value of their returns from cotton. Producing higher quality cotton will allow farmers to sell their crop to new and broader markets.