Economic Empowerment

Gap Inc.'s Personal Advancement & Career Enhancement (P.A.C.E.) program – in which the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) is a partner – was recognized today by former President Bill Clinton at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York as an exemplary approach to economically advancing women worldwide.

"If you want democracies to prove they can produce widespread prosperity...we have got to prove that growth can benefit everybody," Clinton said after Gap Inc. Board Member Bob Fisher presented an update on the P.A.C.E. program. "And it cannot happen unless we do more to make sure women get their fair share of it and that girls can work their way into it. That's why I really wanted this progress report today."

Gap Inc. launched P.A.C.E. in 2007 to provide female garment workers in developing countries life skills education and technical training to help them progress beyond entry-level positions. ICRW collaborated with Gap Inc. to design and evaluate initial efforts in garment factories in India and Cambodia. Today, P.A.C.E. operates in those countries as well as in Vietnam, Bangladesh, China and Sri Lanka – and ICRW continues to evaluate the program's impact globally under the leadership of Priya Nanda, group director of social and economic development at ICRW's Asia Regional Office.

Eighty percent of garment workers worldwide are women. Despite their presence in the workforce, few women advance to management positions or have the chance to build skills they need to grow professionally. P.A.C.E. attempts to change their path. To date, more than 7,500 female garment workers have participated in the program. And ICRW's research shows that the program has helped strengthen women's confidence, improve their communication skills in the workplace and encouraged them to save money regularly.

Through P.A.C.E., others – the women's families, their bosses and co-workers – also have benefited. This is key, according to Bobbi Silten, senior vice president of Gap Inc. Global Responsibility and president of Gap Foundation. Earlier this year at ICRW's first Passports to Progress discussion event, Silten stressed that it's important to the company that its investment not only advance women, but benefit their children and communities, too.

"We really believe that's the way to create sustainable programs," she said. "When everybody gets something, they keep doing it."

Related article: Invest in a Woman, Grow the Economy

Learn more about how ICRW measures women's economic progress

Gillian Gaynair is ICRW's senior writer and editor.

The International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) on Oct. 19 will host “Women: An Emerging Market,” a discussion on how improving women’s ability to earn a living – especially in low- and middle-income countries – can alleviate poverty and drive global economic growth. 

To be held at The National Press Club in Washington, D.C., panelists will be Nemat (Minouche) Shafik, deputy director of the International Monetary Fund, Gayle Smith, special assistant to President Obama and senior director at the National Security Council, and Anju Malhotra, vice president of research, innovation and impact at ICRW. The discussion will be moderated by BBC World News Anchor Katty Kay.

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Panelists are expected to touch on a variety of issues related to how and why women worldwide are increasingly viewed as a force to improve global stability and prosperity. Indeed, The World Bank’s recently-released 2012 world development report, “Gender Equality and Development,” stresses that strengthening women financially – as well as politically and socially – is not only key to global development objectives, it’s also “smart economics.” This may be particularly true in today’s global economic crisis in which foreign aid dollars are decreasing; women could be a promising market for investments that yield multiple returns.

Women: An Emerging Market is the third event in ICRW's 35^th anniversary Passports to Progress discussion series, which aims to advance the dialogue on critical issues likely to shape the lives of women and girls in developing countries in the coming years. Earlier gatherings in the series addressed innovations for women and challenges to and solutions for ending violence against women. Prior panelists and moderators included Dr. Rajiv Shah, administrator of United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Andrea Mitchell, NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent and filmmaker and philanthropist Abigail Disney. 

Gillian Gaynair is ICRW’s senior writer and editor.

Have something you want to ask? ICRW invites you to submit questions on Twitter for BBC’s Katty Kay to ask panelists during our Oct. 19 discussion. Send them to @ICRW. Please use #P2P in your tweets.

Technology has changed the way the world works and lives. But many of the world’s poor, particularly women, have limited access to technologies that can help them enhance their economic opportunities. Since 2009, the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) has been working in collaboration with ExxonMobil and other partners to help identify ways to bridge the gender divide in technology. Kirrin Gill, ICRW’s director of learning and impact, leads a study aimed at identifying best practices in designing and deploying technologies that can help women advance economically. Below, she discusses some early impressions from the research. Gill responded to questions via email.

ICRW: Why is it important to link technology to women in the developing world?

Kirrin Gill: Technology has great potential for advancing women economically, which benefits not just women, but businesses and economies as well. In many countries, however, technological innovations have not always been successful for women because of a failure to respond to their unique needs and interests. And efforts to increase women’s access to technology such as solar lanterns, cookstoves and irrigation pumps, tend to be small in scale and lack the necessary market linkages to make these efforts sustainable. Our research focuses on how to change this.

ICRW: You and a team of ICRW researchers investigated a variety of alternative energy and agriculture technologies that are helping women earn money and improve their productivity. What is one approach that the team found impressive and why?

KG: In Tanzania, we visited Kickstart, an organization that sells the Super MoneyMaker Pressure Pump, a simple technology designed to help farmers irrigate their crops. The irrigation pumps are inexpensive so most people can afford them without financing. They also have few parts, which are easy to replace and purchase, and they are very simple to operate. Kickstart estimates that about 70 percent of their users are women. They also designed the MoneyMaker Hip Pump, a lighter version that’s easier to carry and use in response to the needs of women and older people.

ICRW: What potential does such a technology have to advance women economically?

KG: A technology like this can have enormous impact on women, who make up a majority of the small farmers in Africa. In fact, Kickstart has found these pumps can increase average net incomes by almost tenfold. The women we met in Tanzania proudly took us around their lush, green fields of crops and talked about significant increases in farm income. Women also gain from opportunities to become the pumps’ dealers or distributors or Kickstart staff. 

ICRW: What are you learning from your analysis about what prevents these technologies from reaching poor women?

KG: One of the major challenges in reaching poor women, particularly in rural areas, is to create demand for the technology they are selling and establish financing mechanisms which allow women, who are not always in control of finances, to be able to access the products. Also, it can be difficult to communicate with women in remote areas about a specific technology and how they could benefit from using it. 

In the case of Kickstart, it markets its pumps through 10 regional sales managers and 50 sales representatives, who help raise awareness of the pumps and ultimately sell them to farmers. To improve the marketing skills of these teams, Kickstart provides training, incentive programs and ongoing support. The best sales representatives win prizes, such as a motorcycle. Dealers get money for collecting information about users on a form provided by Kickstart, which allows Kickstart to learn more about who is buying their pumps, so they can more effectively reach them and meet their needs. In Kenya, for example, Kickstart has a cadre of female sales agents to help reach women users, but it can be difficult to retain them in these positions because of their family and domestic obligations.

Our research, scheduled to publish in late 2011, looks at several examples of efforts to bring technology to poor women and will identify innovative practices, lessons learned and recommendations.

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.