On Tuesday, 13 February 2018, the last webinar of our series looked at how businesses can effectively capture women’s economic empowerment. Building on our first two webinars, we held a practical discussion on the best practices in measuring women’s economic empowerment. ​

In the third and final webinar of BCtA’s series on Women’s Economic Empowerment, we addressed key factors and challenges in successfully measuring empowerment in a discussion moderated by Nazila Vali, Knowledge and Partnerships Lead at Business Call to Action. It featured presentations and insights from key experts who have helped to empower women at the Base of the Pyramid (BOP) through their research, products and services, policy or advocacy work, including: Dr Catherine Dolan, Reader in Anthropology at SOAS, University of London and Visiting Scholar at Saïd Business School; Diana Gutierrez, Global Programme Manager of Gender Equality Seal for Private Sector Global at UNDP; Anuj Mehra, Managing Director at Mahindra Rural Housing Finance Limited; and Vava Angwenyi, Founder of Vava Coffee.

Our guests shared their experience in capturing the many dimensions of women’s economic empowerment from a business perspective and discussed common challenges businesses often face in this endeavor.
The conversation sought responses to specific questions including, but not limited to:

• How do we effectively capture women’s economic empowerment from a business perspective?

• What are some of the challenges businesses face when designing an adequate framework to measure women’s economic empowerment and how can we overcome them?

• How we can capture the many dimensions of economic empowerment beyond just income?

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.

Using the links below, you can access the full recordings of the webinars and the accompanying presentation slides. as well as explore the various tools and resources our speakers presented during the webinar.  

Useful Tools and Resources:

• The UNDP Gender Equality Seal for Public and Private Organizations: To close persistent gender gaps in the workplace, UNDP is supporting public and private organizations to implement a Gender Equality Seal Programme.

• Advisory Note on Measures: Women's Economic Empowerment 2016 by Linda Scott with Anna Custers, Catherine Dolan, Mary Johnstone-Louis, Daria Luchinskaya, Ama Marston, Kelly Northridge, Lina Rothman, Laurel Steinfield: The Advisory Note on Measures released in 2016 by a team of researchers in Oxford is an attempt to show where the next stage of thought needs to happen to effectively capture women’s economic empowerment globally.

• Article by Linda Scott presenting the Advisory Note on Measuring Women’s Economic Empowerment in the Double X Economy.

• Understanding and Measuring Women’s Economic Empowerment Definition, Framework and Indicators by Anne Marie Golla, Anju Malhotra, Priya Nanda, and Rekha Mehra. 2011 International Center for Research on Women (ICRW).

• BCtA Impact Measurement Services (BIMS) Case Study: Mahindra Rural Housing Finance and Vava Coffee.