Webinar 2 Recap | Women's Economic Empowerment: Navigating Enablers and Constraints
On Tuesday 6 February 2018, we built on our first conversation held on January 30th on the role business has played and can play in empowering women and discussed in more depth the underlying structural barriers to women’s economic empowerment.
This was the second in BCtA’s webinar series featuring presentations and discussions with key experts who have helped to empower women at the Base of the Pyramid (BOP) market through their research, products or services development, policy or advocacy work.
In a discussion moderated by Carmen Lopez-Clavero, Programme Manager Specialist, Private Sector and Economic Development at Sida; Georgia Taylor, Technical Director at WISE Development, Mashook Mujib Chowdhury, Deputy Manager Sustainability at DBL Group, Nicole Voillat, Group Sustainability Director at Bata Brands and Arianna Rossi, Research and Policy Officer, Better Work, International Labour Organization, discussed the underlying structural barriers to women’s economic empowerment.
One goal of this webinar was twofold: to discuss the constraints preventing women’s empowerment and the enablers allowing women to thrive. The panelists also provided concrete tools for business to engage on that front and shared ideas and stories of women who are leading on the UN Sustainable Development Goals across regions and sectors.
The key messages from the three-webinar series will be included in a final insight report, to be released ahead of International Women’s Day 2018. With that in mind, the discussion sought responses to specific questions including, but not limited to:
How can a company utilize all its potential to create a positive impact on women – people, investments, brand, customers, purchasing power and partnerships?
What are some of the adverse social norms preventing women from entering the labor force?
What are the discriminatory laws and gaps in legal protection and how can we drive policy change in this area?
What are some of the limitations for women in accessing financial and property assets, and what can we do about it?
Via the links below you can explore the full recording of the webinar and the presentation slides used. We also provide links to some of the tools our speakers presented during the webinar:
Useful Tools and Resources:
Empowering women in the workplace, a blog by Mashook Mujib Chowdhury, Deputy Manager, Sustainability, at DBL Group published after the webinar: Bangladeshi garment company DBL Group supporting career progression of its female employees through accelerated leadership training programme.
Bata Rural Sales Program: empowering women at the bottom of the pyramid in Bangladesh.
Supporting Women’s Economic Empowerment: Scope for Sida’s Engagement: The Gender Tool Box gathers knowledge material and method support on gender equality in the form of Tools, Briefs and Thematic Overviews by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency – Sida.
Better Work Global Gender Strategy: Better Work’s five-year gender strategy, released in February 2018, to empower women, reduce sexual harassment and close the gender pay gap in the global garment industry.
Review of evaluation approaches and methods used by interventions on women and girls’ economic empowerment, by Georgia Taylor and Paola Pereznieto, Overseas Development Institute, Social Development Direct and UKaid.
Register for our last webinar of the WEE series on Tuesday 13 Feb here.