Browse by Theme: Reviewed 2021

What does women’s economic empowerment mean to you?

To me, women’s economic empowerment is a fresh and insightful new approach to uplifting the status of women in all walks of life.

Organisations thrive when management and employees have open communications and are able to discuss issues and develop solutions together. Investing in workers can lead to an increase in their productivity, reliability and quality of work. Most importantly, workers who have an effective voice within the workplace and around the issues affecting the wider community, can better protect their rights and achieve their potential. That’s why we’ve just launched a new partnership with Twinings to improve the lives and livelihoods of tea workers and so increase the sustainability of the tea value chain.

The only good thing about the recent revelations over the yawningly wide gender pay gap at the BBC was the outrage. People felt it was morally corrupt and utterly unequal that women were paid less than men for doing the same job in the UK in 2017. We need to feel the same level of outrage about women’s staggering lack of economic empowerment globally. Without focusing more on the rights and equality arguments, decent work for women will remain out of reach.

The Decade of African Women – launched in 2010 by the African Union – has seen significant strides made by African countries to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment. Notable within West Africa has been the drive towards women’s economic empowerment.

On Wednesday 6 September, business leaders and global experts will convene in London to discuss how the private sector can advance the 2017 recommendations of the UN High Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment. Why does it matter, and what will it mean for women – and for business?

The Doing Development Different (DDD) community emerged in August 2014 and advocates that (a) the barriers to development are as much political as technical; (b) international development agencies therefore need to design programmes to be problem-driven, locally led, flexible and adaptive, and politically smart. As Duncan Green mentioned in his blog on 4 August, NGOs have turned up late to the party, but we are doing plenty on the ground that fits under the DDD umbrella. Plus, much of what is supposedly “different” are things we ought to be doing anyway.

After the G20 meeting in Bonn and at the Global Insurance Forum this July, DFID announced its plans for the Centre for Global Disaster Protection, a £30million initiative to support countries and the international humanitarian system to think through how to prepare and plan for risk, and to help governments and humanitarian agencies get support more quickly, reliably and cost-effectively when a natural disaster strikes. But could the Centre have a greater impact by going ‘beyond only finance’?