.

Years ago I met Ade, a farmer living just beyond the city of Ibadan, Nigeria. Ade was cultivating a small, sparsely planted plot with a baby on her back and three other visibly undernourished older children standing nearby. Her efforts to grow an improved soybean variety, which could have improved her children’s diet, had failed because she lacked the time to tend to the new crop and could not afford to hire labor.

It was clear that high fertility and poverty left Ade in a position with little time to invest in growing a potentially high-value crop, even when she had received free seeds and farming advice from the local agricultural research agency.

Ade represents the unrealized potential of women’s economic empowerment. Women like Ade toil in every country and region–in remote villages and urban slums, as subsistence farmers and entrepreneurs. Though their income levels and circumstances differ, what they all have in common is untapped and underutilized economic potential.

That has significant consequences for us all. When women increase their earnings, societies benefit from greater investments in child health and education and reduced poverty for all. Earnings alter the domestic environment for women, boosting their self-esteem and bargaining power at home and reducing domestic violence and mistreatment. Women who work are also more likely to delay marriage and early pregnancy. They establish new norms for the girls in their families and communities.

Why, then, is Ade’s economic potential, and that of the millions of women like her, unrealized? Until now, a fundamental evidence gap has limited our understanding of how to support and strengthen women’s economic contributions–a gap that has interfered with the optimal design and delivery of programs that can help women better leverage information, assets, credit and markets to overcome the constraints imposed by social norms, laws and circumstances, and to achieve and sustain economic success.

That’s why the United Nations Foundation partnered with the ExxonMobil Foundation to release a report, A Roadmap for Promoting Women’s Economic Empowerment, which addresses that gap, synthesizing the best available research and identifying proven, promising, and high-potential interventions ideal for women in specific economic circumstances.

Rigorous evidence shows there are services, including access to savings accounts, rural electrification, business training, land tenure rights, access to childcare and the use of mobile phones for banking and market information that work well.

But the evidence also points to several important caveats. First, for whom the service is designed matters. Women are not all the same, and especially very poor farmers and entrepreneurs need more assistance to grow their productivity and earnings. Second, the context is also important. A country’s demographic profile, whether it has high fertility, an aging population or men missing due to conflict, also affects job prospects for women and influences program implementation.

We also learned that many interventions fail because women's particular constraints are not taken into account. Modifying programs to accommodate the time constraints of women micro-entrepreneurs, for example, or the social constraints of women farmers in conservative settings can be relatively simple and lead to more effective programs. Clever design features, like using mobile phones to deliver financial services, can help women overcome the economic sanctions imposed by their family or community.

While more research is still needed, the Roadmap’s findings provide a solid foundation upon which to build more effective programs for women like Ade, and to drive women’s economic advancement worldwide.

Mayra Buvinic, an internationally recognized expert on gender and development and social development, is a Senior Fellow with the UN Foundation. Between 2005 and 2011, she was Director for Gender and Development at the World Bank; before joining the Bank, she worked at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) where she headed the Social Development Division and advised the IDB on violence prevention (1996-2005). Prior to that, she was founding member and President of the International Center for Research on Women (1978-1996). She has written extensively on gender and development and gender and poverty issues; violence reduction and violence prevention; and social development and social inclusion, the latter with a particular focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. She has a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.

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Closing the Evidence Gap, Realizing the Potential

November 21, 2013

Years ago I met Ade, a farmer living just beyond the city of Ibadan, Nigeria. Ade was cultivating a small, sparsely planted plot with a baby on her back and three other visibly undernourished older children standing nearby. Her efforts to grow an improved soybean variety, which could have improved her children’s diet, had failed because she lacked the time to tend to the new crop and could not afford to hire labor.

It was clear that high fertility and poverty left Ade in a position with little time to invest in growing a potentially high-value crop, even when she had received free seeds and farming advice from the local agricultural research agency.

Ade represents the unrealized potential of women’s economic empowerment. Women like Ade toil in every country and region–in remote villages and urban slums, as subsistence farmers and entrepreneurs. Though their income levels and circumstances differ, what they all have in common is untapped and underutilized economic potential.

That has significant consequences for us all. When women increase their earnings, societies benefit from greater investments in child health and education and reduced poverty for all. Earnings alter the domestic environment for women, boosting their self-esteem and bargaining power at home and reducing domestic violence and mistreatment. Women who work are also more likely to delay marriage and early pregnancy. They establish new norms for the girls in their families and communities.

Why, then, is Ade’s economic potential, and that of the millions of women like her, unrealized? Until now, a fundamental evidence gap has limited our understanding of how to support and strengthen women’s economic contributions–a gap that has interfered with the optimal design and delivery of programs that can help women better leverage information, assets, credit and markets to overcome the constraints imposed by social norms, laws and circumstances, and to achieve and sustain economic success.

That’s why the United Nations Foundation partnered with the ExxonMobil Foundation to release a report, A Roadmap for Promoting Women’s Economic Empowerment, which addresses that gap, synthesizing the best available research and identifying proven, promising, and high-potential interventions ideal for women in specific economic circumstances.

Rigorous evidence shows there are services, including access to savings accounts, rural electrification, business training, land tenure rights, access to childcare and the use of mobile phones for banking and market information that work well.

But the evidence also points to several important caveats. First, for whom the service is designed matters. Women are not all the same, and especially very poor farmers and entrepreneurs need more assistance to grow their productivity and earnings. Second, the context is also important. A country’s demographic profile, whether it has high fertility, an aging population or men missing due to conflict, also affects job prospects for women and influences program implementation.

We also learned that many interventions fail because women's particular constraints are not taken into account. Modifying programs to accommodate the time constraints of women micro-entrepreneurs, for example, or the social constraints of women farmers in conservative settings can be relatively simple and lead to more effective programs. Clever design features, like using mobile phones to deliver financial services, can help women overcome the economic sanctions imposed by their family or community.

While more research is still needed, the Roadmap’s findings provide a solid foundation upon which to build more effective programs for women like Ade, and to drive women’s economic advancement worldwide.

Mayra Buvinic, an internationally recognized expert on gender and development and social development, is a Senior Fellow with the UN Foundation. Between 2005 and 2011, she was Director for Gender and Development at the World Bank; before joining the Bank, she worked at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) where she headed the Social Development Division and advised the IDB on violence prevention (1996-2005). Prior to that, she was founding member and President of the International Center for Research on Women (1978-1996). She has written extensively on gender and development and gender and poverty issues; violence reduction and violence prevention; and social development and social inclusion, the latter with a particular focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. She has a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.