Going beyond employment to empower girls and women

Think about how inclusive business can contribute to the empowerment of women and girls. What comes first to mind is perhaps the obvious: employing women and girls of working age can have a tremendous positive impact on their lives. Many of them already work as unpaid labour, in the family farm, and doing most of the household chores and childcare, which doesn’t bring any income. For instance, it is estimated that 50 per cent of the girls and women in Tanzania and Uganda work on the family farms, but don’t earn or control income from this work. While laws in these countries are changing so that women may own, control, and inherit resources, husbands generally control their wives’ earnings. This dependence can make it difficult for women and girls to leave an abusive situation.

Giving someone a sustainable income has an obvious impact: financial independence allows girls to make their own choices, or have a bigger say in a family decision. Women and girls who earn an income often report getting more respect within the family or the community. The considerable evidence of the direct and tangible benefits of income to girls led early-stage SPRING to work with a number of businesses whose primary pathway of empowering adolescent girls (of legal working age) was through employment.

One of the best example of our first cohort is KadAfrica: they support girls to launch their own passionfruit farms in Uganda, providing them with land, seedlings and training. Together with SPRING, they designed their model to work with out-of-school girls once they reached legal working age. These girls are amongst the most disadvantaged members of the community, and working with KadAfrica provides them with an opportunity to earn an income. KadAfrica has also seen that the families and communities change the way they perceive adolescent girls as they earn and contribute to the household income.

While this model promises immense depth of impact, the true challenge is to bring business solutions that can benefit all girls – not only girls of employment age – and have enough scale to reach 200,000 girls by 2019. As an experiment trying to find the recipe for business solutions for girls, we had to go beyond employment. Hence we selected our second cohort businesses with scale in mind, incorporating organisations that could directly benefit girls on a greater scale through the product or service they would develop.

In Nepal, harassment is prevalent in public transport, in schools, communities and homes and women and girls are often unable to assert themselves. Fightback came to SPRING as a small scale self-defence training provider, working with private sector companies and embassies and training mainly women. They knew they could reach girls, but didn’t know how to do it in a scalable and profitable way. 

Using Human Centred Design approaches through SPRING, Fightback identified that parents were concerned enough about the safety of their daughters that they were willing to pay for them to receive self defence training at school or as an extracurricular activity. Together with SPRING, Fightback refined a prototype to engage schools via en-masse trainings of up to 1,000 girls in one session. With fees covered by the school and the parents, they trained 4,000 girls so far, and quadrupled their revenue. They now plan to train 30,000 girls in the next two years in Nepal, and are already thinking about expansion to their neighbour market: India.

A double benefit is conferred when young women are employed making a product or delivering a service that empowers girls. And we have several successful examples of that:

• In Bangladesh, iSocial is building a network of young women - called kallyanis - who are going door to door to serve adolescent girls in rural areas with sexual and reproductive health information as well as a set of dedicated affordable products. They plan to hire 2,500 kallyanis in the next 2 years, with a goal of reaching 750,000 adolescent girls.
• In Pakistan, Sehat Kahani is trying to address a double issue: “doctor brides”, female doctors who stopped working after getting married, and lack of access to healthcare. Sehat Kahani developed a telemedicine model to enable female doctors to practice from their homes, while setting up clinics in rural and peri-urban areas to serve women and girls who are deprived of healthcare, especially pregnant teenage girls.

We like to call it the double empowering effect, achieving depth and scale of impact in one model. And this is just the beginning! We know that for solutions to provide a lasting benefit to girls, businesses need to address social norms. SPRING is working with them to think beyond girls: how can we engage men and boys in the solution? Fightback are considering designing a parallel outreach programme for boys to educate them about gender based violence. Sehat Kahani is thinking about how they can influence negative mindsets of the husbands and fathers of their adolescent girl patients to enable them to benefit from more services. iSocial are wondering how the Kallyanis can talk not only to the girls and their mothers, but to the whole village, challenging the stigma around talking about sexual and reproductive health. When businesses can bring their skills to the challenge of changing social norms and work effectively to increase this change, only then will we have truly inclusive business solutions.

This blog is a part of the September 2017 series on Empowering women, in partnership with SPRING.

Read the full series for insights on business models that empower girls and women, a new analysis of gender impacts of value chain interventions, tips on gender-lens investing and many inspiring personal stories from women.