Ella Duffy - DCED

Gender-Sensitive Business Environment Reform: Why does it matter? – A policy guide

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2017, DCED – 11 pages

The premise of this policy guide is that without addressing gender-specific issues or women’s greater vulnerability to business environment constraints at all levels, functions and components of the business environment, women’s employment and entrepreneurship will be hampered. This in turn will have serious implications for WEE, gender equality, jobs, income, and poverty alleviation. It is essential that donors mainstream gender considerations while further seeking to achieve transformative change during business environment reform interventions at all stages of the programme development cycle. As gender influences and is influenced by all aspects of the business environment, it also needs to be considered for all aspects and stages of programming. Critically, any gender-sensitive business environment reform will require addressing not only the factors that directly restrict women’s employment and entrepreneurship but also the socio-cultural binding constraints on women to effectively remove negative implications on economic empowerment and sustainable economic growth.

On the Move – Women’s Economic Empowerment in Contexts of Migration and Forced Displacement

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2019, DCED – 74 pages

Growing international and internal migrations and forced displacements have special implications for the possibility of WEE, and associated improvements in gender equality and women’s rights. This scoping study focuses on:

documenting the state of practice of WEE in the context of migration and forced displacement.
identifying and documenting programmes that provide relevant examples of possible initiatives, successes, and lessons learned.
identifying gaps in current knowledge and approaches for further study.
recommending potential private sector development initiatives in the field.

Case Study: Gender-Sensitive Business Environment Reform and Informality

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2017, DCED – 30 pages

Gender-sensitive business environment reform can play a valuable role in reducing the overall levels of informality and unfair competition for registered firms, drive tax revenues and regulatory oversight, as well as support the graduation of women’s and men’s enterprises and employment into the formal economy. This case study provides an overview of the business environment constraints for women entrepreneurs to formalising their business activity. Furthermore, it highlights from a limited sample, examples of gender-sensitive business environment reform programmes that have addressed the direct and indirect business environment constraints to business registration and licensing and details their approaches, success factors and lessons learned.

Case Study: Advancing Women’s Financial Inclusion through Gender-Sensitive Business Environment Reform

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2017, DCED – 34 pages

Gender-sensitive business environment reform refers to changes in policy, legal, institutional, and regulatory conditions that govern business activities in ways that account for the dynamics of socially constructed relationships between men and women. A gender-sensitive business environment can play an enabling role in addressing women’s financial inclusion. This case study provides an overview of the business environment constraints to women’s financial inclusion. Furthermore, it highlights from a limited sample, examples of gender-sensitive business environment reform interventions that have addressed the direct and indirect business environment constraints to women’s financial inclusion and details their approaches, success factors and lessons learned.

Measurement of Women’s Economic Empowerment – WOW (2020)

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2020, WOW – 54 pages

This Guidance Note identifies core indicators, principles, and recommendations for effective, consistent measurement of WEE. It includes a recognition that there is no universal set of indicators that will be appropriate for every project, in every sector and every context. To provide effective measurement and avoid negative unintended impacts, selection of indicators must follow on from a robust context-specific gender analysis to guide decision making about the measurable outcomes the programme is aiming to achieve. Principles for effective WEE measurement within economic development programming include:

Build programmes on strong context-specific gender analysis.
Develop a causal chain (logframe) and theory of change that is informed by an understanding of the context and previous experience with the same or similar interventions in similar settings.
Measure what matters to diverse women and girls and disaggregate measures accordingly.
Measure both economic and social outcomes.
Measure change at individual and household levels.
Measure access, control, and constraints.
Consider – and measure – risks and unintended effects.
Data collection choices matter.

Measuring WEE: A Compendium of Selected Tools – CGD (2020)

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2020, CGD – 120 pages

This compendium selects and reviews tools for measuring WEE (or disempowerment) grouped into 20 population monitoring tools and 15 monitoring and evaluation tools (M&E). The main objective is practical: helping readers both understand how different measurement tools are built and select among the most well-known and widely (cross-culturally) applicable tools for different purposes. The following basic questions help readers select which WEE measurement tool is a “good fit for your purpose”:

What is your desired objective? (Population monitoring or M&E)
What is your substantive focus? (e.g., gender equality, women’s legal rights, women’s empowerment in agriculture)
What specific dimensions of WEE interest you? (e.g., financial inclusion, land rights)
What population of women are you seeking to learn about? (Women globally, women entrepreneurs, women in Africa)

What level(s) of outcomes — direct, intermediate and/or final — interest you?

Measuring Women’s Economic Empowerment in Private Sector Development: Guidelines for practitioners – DCED (2014)

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2014, DCED – 60 pages

This guideline provides suggestions on the measurement of WEE in private sector development (PSD) programmes, including the measurement of household results. It aims to:

Provide practical advice to practitioners seeking to measure WEE in PSD programming;
Document how to make each aspect of results measurement more gender-responsive;
Highlight important issues in results measurement for practitioners focused on WEE, paying particular attention to measuring household-level changes.

How to Integrate Gender & Women’s Economic Empowerment into Private Sector Development – DCED (2017)

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2017, DCED – 45 pages

This paper seeks to provide Private Sector Development programmes aspiring to ‘do more on WEE’ but struggling to know where to start, ‘step up’ the gender-responsiveness of their programme by providing:

Concise, practical guidance on how to incorporate WEE into programme delivery and Monitoring and Results Measurement systems. This guidance is organised into ‘WEE reflection points’, and structured according to the 7 elements of the DCED’s popular Standard for Results Measurement;
Links to the best proven and practical tools and resources available;
Real programme examples and case studies.

A Practical Guide to Measuring Women’s and Girls’ Empowerment in Impact Evaluations – JPAL (2018)

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2018, JPAL – 52 pages

This practical guide can help provide researchers and practitioners with the tools to select or develop their own indicators of empowerment that are right for their impact evaluations. It emphasises the importance of conducting in-depth formative research to understand gender dynamics in the specific context before starting an evaluation, developing locally tailored indicators to complement internationally standardised ones, and reducing the potential for reporting bias in instruments and data collection plans. Instead of providing a single set of ready-to-go survey instruments, a process for developing indicators appropriate to each study is outlined along with extensive examples. Additionally, the guide highlights key challenges for measuring empowerment:

measuring people’s ability to make important life choices is challenging because we rarely observe decision-making directly.
empowerment is a process.
many aspects of empowerment are susceptible to reporting bias.
empowerment means different things in different contexts.
prioritizing outcome measures is difficult.
measuring women’s preferences is challenging in contexts where women have internalised society’s views.
disempowerment can heighten data collection challenges.

Toolkits from the UN Secretary-General’s High Level Panel on WEE – UN Women (2017)

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2017, UN Women – online tool

A host of comprehensive resources from the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on WEE, making the case for investment in WEE, its timeliness and the current landscape. The platform also includes several “how -to” guides that detail appropriate courses of action on the seven drivers of transformation:

Driver 1: How to change norms in support of women’s economic empowerment
Driver 2: How to ensure legal protections and reform discriminatory laws and regulations
Driver 3: How to recognize, reduce and redistribute unpaid work and care
Driver 4: How to build assets – digital, financial and property
Driver 5: How to change business culture and practice
Driver 6: How to improve public sector practices in employment and procurement
Driver 7: How to strengthen visibility, collective voice and representation