Enhancing the Productivity of Women-Owned Enterprises: The evidence on what works – IDRC (2016)

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IDRC, 2016 – 33 pages

This paper takes stock of what we know about women entrepreneurs, the barriers they face, the role of economic and social-cultural factors, what works in supporting women-owned businesses, and where the knowledge gaps are.

Main takeaways:

  • Training programmes can work and have positive impacts on business behaviour, but longer-term and growth impacts are not easily found. In-depth and longer training and mentorship are likely to have larger impacts.
  • While addressing constraints to financing is a key priority, finance on its own may not have a large impact on most women-owned businesses.
  • Access to mobile phones and other technologies, similarly, is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Gender-specific applications can be critical; for example, to allow women to better manage the needs of both business and household investments.
  • Women need the legal protection that business registration offers.

Growing Micro-Enterprises: How gender and family can impact outcomes – evidence from Uganda – ILO (2017)

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ILO, 2017 – 5 pages

The study was designed to test whether expanding access to capital via grants or loans would increase the profits of micro-enterprises owned by men or women and whether the ILO’s entrepreneurship training “Start and Improve Your Business” (SIYB) could further increase impacts. The gender of the programme recipient matters a lot for the impact they can obtain. Men benefit from the package of microloans and training, leading to a 54% increase in profits and similar effects on employment. Other types of assistance such as loans only, grants only, or the combination of grants and training do not lead to sustained impact for men. However, women realise no impact, whether they received loans, grants, training, or any combination of these. The results point to a recent observation by researchers: the success of programmes hinges on who has the power to utilise the interventions being offered. In Uganda, the gender of the person matters a lot for the success of the programme because men and women have different spheres of control and women are more exposed to family pressure.

Empowering Women Entrepreneurs in Developing Countries: Why current programs fall short – Brookings (2019)

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Africa Growth Initiative at Brookings, 2019 – 9 pages

Current WEE interventions are not enough to overcome all obstacles facing female entrepreneurs. The emerging evidence from psychology and experimental economics on agency; mind-set, and leadership show that for successful interventions to be transformative, they need to move beyond basic access to financial and human capital and tackle central psychological, social, and skills constraints on women entrepreneurs.

Main implications for policy and practice:

  • Providing business skills training is a basic step toward empowering women entrepreneurs, but to truly achieve transformative change, training programmes need to address deeper psychological and social constraints facing women.
  • Similarly, financial access, while a basic step in WEE, cannot alone help grow subsistence enterprises owned by women who face multiple binding constraints.
  • Finally, a clear measure of success is important.

Summarizing the Key Characteristics, Enabling Environment and Needs of Women-Owned Businesses – MEDA (2020)

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MEDA, 2020 – 24 pages

This report outlines the key characteristics, influencing the environment, and needs of Women-Owned Businesses (WBEs) to support investors and business service providers in Africa to adopt a gender lens within their current practices and policies. This paper starts with a review summarizing the characteristics of WBEs and their enabling environment. It also describes key findings from the primary field research conducted on technical assistance and business support; financial support; and gender-specific considerations. Communalities found across WBEs:

  • Limited access to resources including collateral and other sources of financing.
  • Slow to moderate business growth orientation.
  • Limited knowledge of financing options and financial management.
  • If married and/or have children, added pressure of requiring spousal support and balancing childcare.
  • Low self-confidence to grow their business and seek investment support.
  • Risk-averse to investment and fast growth.
  • Underestimate performance.
  • Childcare & community responsibilities.

How Women Contribute to and Benefit from Growth. Integrating Women’s Economic Empowerment into the Market Development Facility (MDF) Approach (2015)

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Market Development Facility, 2015 – 62 pages

This Strategic Guidance Note explains the background to and international thinking on WEE and describes how the MDF programme addresses WEE. Most notably, it provides an interesting example of how to structurally integrate a diagnostic WEE framework in a wider market development approach.

Understanding Unpaid Care Work to Empower Women in Market Systems Approaches – BEAM (2016)

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BEAM Exchange, 2016 – 51 pages

This document is intended to support market systems programmes to understand and address unpaid care work by:

  • guiding practitioners on approaches to diagnose constraints related to unpaid care.
  • providing tools to carry these out.
  • outlining with real examples how programmes have designed interventions to target problematic aspects of care provision based on facilitation approaches using systems thinking.

For programmes that target women’s empowerment, heavy and unequal unpaid care will likely be a system-level constraint. By understanding how programmes’ interventions interact with existing care work and responsibilities, they can use the potential of systemic responses to improve both market operations and livelihood outcomes.

Women’s Empowerment and Market Systems (WEAMS) Framework – BEAM (2016)

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BEAM Exchange, 2016 – 49 pages

This report details the challenges for donor agencies to design and implement gender-transformative programmes. It is both an update of the Making Markets Work for the Poor WEE Framework (the M4P WEE Framework) for those who utilised the earlier resource, and a standalone paper for others who have more recently ventured into the space. However, this paper goes further than the important work of refining concepts, sharing experiences, and offering practical advice per process step; it highlights the paradigm shift that must take place for market systems initiatives to fully embed WEE and to create sustainable and equitable systems change.

Developing Gender-Sensitive Value Chains: Guidelines for practitioners – FAO (2018)

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FAO, 2018 – 116 pages

These guidelines aim to support practitioners in translating FAO’s Gender-Sensitive Value Chain Framework into action. They are primarily intended to assist practitioners in designing and implementing interventions that provide women and men with equal opportunities to benefit from agri-food value chain development. They offer practical tools and examples of successful approaches to foster a more systematic integration of gender equality dimensions in value chain interventions in the agricultural sector and enhance the social impact of these interventions. The publication consists of two main sections:

  • Gender-sensitive analysis of the value chain presents tools and resources to assess and select value chains from a gender perspective and guides practitioners in the identification of the gender-based constraints (GBCs) that undermine both the performance of the chain and women’s opportunities for economic empowerment.
  • Actions for addressing GBCs in value chain interventions explore possible solutions to address them as an integral part of the value chain upgrading strategy.

Developing Gender-Sensitive Value Chains: A guiding framework – FAO (2016)

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FAO, 2016 – 52 pages

The purpose of this publication is to introduce the Gender-Sensitive Value Chain (GSVC) framework, which facilitates the systematic integration of gender equality dimensions into value chain development programmes and projects. In addition to accounting for the levels of analysis presented in the Sustainable Food Value Chain framework (core and extended VC, national and global enabling environments), the GSVC framework features two additional levels: the household and individual level. Most value chain development approaches stop at the household level. Yet gender inequalities often originate within the household, and individual agency and power might also depend on intrahousehold dynamics. The report raises awareness of gender inequalities and discusses the importance of addressing these dimensions in value chain development, while also building a common approach for work on GSVC development.

This framework is complemented by the Guidelines for practitioners that provide specific tools to support practitioners in designing, implementing, and monitoring GSVC programmes.

Gender and Business Environment Reform: What is “Best Practice”? – BERF (2016)

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BERF, 2016 – 32 pages

This report investigates how to make incremental improvements to existing programmes and learn more about how they can benefit women, whilst continuing to build on what is already working in the field. This report recommends the following:

  • Results should be disaggregated by gender for all programmes.
  • Ideally, a country-specific diagnostic should be conducted before programme activities are specified.
  • Diagnostics should include simple primary research to fill data gaps and to test whether official procedures are implemented as written.
  • Where primary research is not feasible, a lighter touch diagnostic analysis should be undertaken using the many existing sources of information.