This paper is aimed to support the Donor Committee for Enterprise Development (DCED) member projects to integrate gender considerations more fully into private sector development (PSD) measurement systems. It takes a first step at bridging the knowledge gap by reviewing current literature for: definitions of women’s economic empowerment; identifying current measures for women’s economic empowerment in women’s entrepreneurship development (WED); and offering practical ways forward for measuring household level change in women’s economic empowerment.
Key Findings:
- Household relationships have been identified as a key frontier for women’s empowerment, which have important spill over effects in all spheres of life, including women’s entrepreneurship development.
- Decisions, relations and norms at the household level may affect opportunities for women and girls for education, autonomy and space to pursue their goals and innovations; as well as support networks, motivation and aspirations in entering entrepreneurship.
- Violence and fear of violence are central to women’s disempowerment, social capital and engagement in public spaces.
Recommendations:
- Integrate gender into current quantitative monitoring tools. An important first step in integrating gender more effectively in current measurement frameworks is to ensure indicators are sex disaggregated. Measurement tools should also be reviewed to identify opportunities to integrate qualitative questions on women’s economic empowerment at the household level.
- Advance learning on qualitative measures for WED and women’s economic empowerment. Reports reviewed had limited household level measures, and methods tended to rely heavily on quantitative metrics. To gain a more nuanced understanding of change in women’s economic empowerment, further work is needed to explore qualitative approaches toward monitoring change.
- Pilot methods for measuring women’s economic empowerment at the household level. Building from the literature review, a practical next step would be to support projects in reflecting on women’s economic empowerment at the household level, and defining indicators and methods for monitoring change in this area.
- Test hypotheses on the link between WED and women’s economic empowerment. To advance its own learning agenda, the DCED WED working group may identify and prioritize critical assumptions that underlie current thinking on WED and women’s economic empowerment. This can offer a coherent theme around which to advance learning for program quality and leveraging impact.
- Strengthen organisational commitment to results measurement and gender. Robust measurement and commitment to WED and women’s economic empowerment requires a strong organizational leadership and operational strategy for learning, measurement and gender.
- Ensure flexible systems for measurement. Given the complexity of women’s economic empowerment, systems of measurement should also be flexible to detect unpredicted changes as well as track important indicators that may emerge. This requires flexibility among organizations and donor relationships to strengthen effective results measurement.