Business and economic empowerment of women

What is the relevance of this to Mary and her new born baby Mathilde who I met in Zambia in September? Mary is just 15. She lives with her parents, her brothers, her sisters in a poor family. Like the other 500 million girls in the developing world, economic empowerment for Mary means access to finance, the labour market and economic decisions in the home. Like most girls Mary carries the burden of unpaid care work - child care, food preparation, fetching of water and cleaning.

The financial crisis in the global north has affected not only Mary but Zambia’s whole economy. Layoffs, government cut backs and falling domestic prices have led to less food for some of the poorest families in Zambia and other developing countries from El Salvador to Bangladesh and Indonesia.

Mary dropped out of school to have her baby and without an education will earn 10 to 20 per cent less than girls who have stayed on. Is there an alternative?

Ruth found one. When her parents died Ruth had to drop out of school. She joined a village savings and loans group and with a loan of £6 she bought maize and sugar and brewed beer. Within a month she had repaid the loan. After 5 months she set up a small shop is saving to get back to school.

What is different about this success story is that Ruth is one of 230k of the ‘unbanked’, 3/4 of them women and girls, who are benefitting from Banking on Change partnership between Barclays, Plan and Care which is doing 3 things:

Outreach: make use of savings-led approaches to provide direct access to financial services to around 400,000 new clients

Impact: improve the quality of life for clients through financial services and add-ons such as business skill development.

Inclusion: linking savings groups with banks by developing products, services and channels tailored to their needs

In Indonesia we have researched the different needs of girls at the three stages of their life and you can see a convergence between a traditional business new product development model and our NGO methodology. In Banking on Change there is a convergence between Barclays who want to understand the ‘bottom billion’ and add social value to their business, and the NGO’s mission to reduce poverty through poor people accessing financial services.

That could help Mary’s economic empowerment like it helped Ruth’s. Perhaps Mary will make a living from the land but how can this income be increased?

In Pakistan a partnership of EU Plan and Millac works with female farmers to increase the amount they receive for their milk from 28 to 38 rupees per litre. Working with communities, Plan found there is an undersupply of quality milk but individual farmers could not invest to improve quality. With an EU grant we commissioned a value chain analysis, identified how to drive out cost and drive in quality and worked with local women who formed cooperatives. Millac bid for the milk and in nearly every case the coops with their new cooling and storage facilities were able to meet quality standards. Millac saw the convergence.

And what about supporting girls like Mary to go back to school and gain skills to enter employment? New jobs in new industries are enabling girls to improve their income and their status throughout the world. Last month in Bangladesh I met Rantha who because of poverty had to drop out of school but now with a year’s vocational training is earning as much as her father. A partnership with a local manufacturer of solar lamps means girls trained by Plan are sure of a job. The lamps are in turn bought by the World Bank for energy saving projects in Africa.

Cisco is well known for its girls’ Networking Academies where young women are trained in IT. The poorest lack social and financial skills and that is an area where we are starting to work together with Plan identifying girls from poor backgrounds and training them in soft skills and Cisco providing the technical training.

Convergence again. For several years I worked in business and see a convergence between the need for companies to demonstrate they deliver value for shareholders and for society as “good corporate citizens” with the development sector’s need to engage corporations in helping to tackle development challenges by harnesses their skills. It is not simple as the culture and skill sets are different but it does make a difference.

I am keen for Plan to be part of this new breed of alliances. Plan works in Mary’s community as part of the Young Health Programme, a partnership between AstraZeneca, John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Plan International, to help young people in need around the world deal with the health issues they face so they can improve their chances of living a better life. In Zambia with Care and Barclays we are seeing what financial skills and services Mary needs. Training young people to monitor and run these programmes is job creation in itself.

We need to find more partners who will put the outcome for Mary before their own company’s systems and ways of working. When I was in Pearsons it was called being customer focused. There is a new market of customers - the size of the European union – the 500 million girls in the developing world and a whole new generation who can move from poverty to opportunity if we get it right.