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

Gender Transformative Approaches in the Global Programme to End Child Marriage- UNICEF (2019)

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Child marriage is both a symptom and a result of deep seated gender inequalities and restrictive gender norms. Addressing child marriage therefore necessitates a gender-transformative approach, tackling harmful gender roles, norms and power relations. This note articulates strategies for adopting a gender-transformative approach in designing, implementing and measuring programmes in UNICEF’s Global Programme to reduce child marriage and contribute to the ultimate outcome of promoting gender equality over the long term.

 

 

AWEF Practitioner Learning Brief – Working with the Private Sector to Empower Women: What to measure and how to build the business case for change

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2019, AWEF – 54 pages

There is a related SEEP webinar: Working with the Private Sector to Empower Women: How to Build the Business Case for Change

This brief brings together learning and practice on how to develop a robust business case, which demonstrates the commercial and financial value of adopting new gender-sensitive business practices to private sector partners. It presents a range of business frameworks, approaches, tools, data, and metrics that can be used to build the business case of investing in WEE. Furthermore, a process map on what practitioners need to consider when selecting frameworks and indicators is included too.

Main takeaways:

  • There is no blueprint or right way to make the business case for WEE. The approach must be pragmatic, relevant, and tailored to the country context, to the constraints facing women, the sector in question and the specific interests of private sector partners.
  • Whilst there is a range of guidance and information on principles and approaches that can be used for business case development, they are often not sufficiently tailored to WEE focused interventions. They also rarely distinguish between the role of women as workers, consumers and suppliers, or producers.
  • The report finds that the key to success is for practitioners to understand what stops women from participating in markets, to effectively “sell” the benefits of innovations and to encourage private sector partners to test and change their business practices so that they are more inclusive of women.