Priya Nanda

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.

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.

The International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) this month discussed proven approaches to end child marriage with The Elders, an eminent group of global leaders, during a strategic planning meeting convened by the group in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. ICRW’s Anju Malhotra presented a preview of ICRW’s report, “Solutions to End Child Marriage: What the Evidence Shows,” and helped inform The Elders in their goal to build a global alliance to end child marriage.

The Elders were brought together by former South African president, Nelson Mandela, in an effort to use members’ influence and experience to address some of the world’s most pressing problems. One of the group’s objectives is to promote equality for women and girls, and ending child marriage is an initiative under that umbrella. For the June gathering, The Elders convened representatives from 55 organizations to share information about effective approaches to address child marriage, explore how to give the issue more visibility in global policy and discuss the objectives of forming a global alliance to combat child marriage.

The meeting "would have been incomplete" without ICRW's presence, said Mabel van Oranje, chief executive officer of The Elders. "From the very beginning of The Elders' involvement in this issue, it has been clear that ICRW is a leading organization in this field and has an enormous amount of experience and knowledge."

Malhotra and ICRW’s Priya Nanda were among several experts who presented before like-minded colleagues and four members of The Elders in attendance: Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights; Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chairman of The Elders and former chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Dr. Gro Brundtland, Norway’s former prime minister and the ex-director of the World Health Organization; and Graça Machel, a well-known international advocate for women’s and children’s rights and president of Mozambique’s Foundation for Community Development.

The Elders opened the two-day meeting by discussing the scope of child marriage and why they feel it deserves more attention than it currently receives. According to a summary provided by the group, Archbishop Tutu said he was “shattered” to meet Ethiopian women and girls who had married as young as 8 years old. “You can understand something cerebrally,” he said, “but it is not the same when it is translated into flesh and blood.” Child marriage is particularly prevalent in Ethiopia, where nearly half of all girls are married before they turn 18.

ICRW’s involvement with the meeting represents a two-year relationship with The Elders, who have consulted with Malhotra on the issue of child marriage, its consequences, and what works to prevent it. "ICRW has helped us, and the Elders themselves, to better understand the magnitude of the problem," van Oranje said, "and its relationship to other development challenges such as maternal health, education and the empowerment of girls and women."

It's an issue that ICRW has been studying for more than a decade. Among the organization’s current projects that address child marriage or work with child brides is an evaluation of India’s conditional cash transfer program to prevent child marriage, which Nanda directs, and a project in Ethiopia that teaches recently-wedded girls about earning and saving money as well as about reproductive health.

ICRW’s research evidence shows that arming girls with information – about how their bodies work, what sex is, how to make healthy life decisions – is key to preventing early marriage. This approach is most effective when done while simultaneously educating girls’ communities about the issue and creating an environment in which alternatives to early marriage are supported.

Indeed, participants at The Elders meeting agreed that local communities must be on board to end child marriage, and that interventions should be holistic, multi-faceted and rights-based. They said that a global alliance could help accelerate the process and expressed interest in forming national alliances for change, as well.

Malhotra and others also agreed that The Elders should now focus on writing a mission statement for the global alliance and developing a work plan that synergizes the activities of organizations addressing child marriage in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Gillian Gaynair is ICRW’s writer and editor.

The following video features highlights from The Elders’ meeting and their visit with child brides in Ethiopia’s Amhara region: