The SEEP Network and UN Women have teamed up to offer you a chance to engage with key experts on both conceptual and practical issues around women’s economic empowerment in inclusive market systems. Following an exceptionally well-attended first webinar in the "From Theory to Practice: Women’s Economic Empowerment in Inclusive Market Systems Development" series, we now begin diving into the practical implications of the theoretical approach that was presented in January.
Most market systems projects tend to focus on supporting self-employed poor women and men. Yet most women are wage workers or are employed by someone other than themselves for their main source of income. Market systems projects that do address employment tend to focus on job creation, and do not necessarily seek to improve the quality of employment. Specifically, women tend to be overrepresented in low-pay, low-productivity work with little security or protection. They also experience higher incidence of sexual harassment and exploitation. Moreover, the poorest women in many market systems, and agriculture in particular, are not formally employed, but contribute to enterprises as unpaid household or community workers. This webinar explored the gender dimensions of wage work and how our market systems programming can better tackle this often overlooked, but critical, aspect of women's economic empowerment.
Bama Athreya - Senior Specialist Labor and Employment Rights, USAID
Bama Athreya is a Senior Specialist, Labor and Employment Rights at USAID. She manages USAID’s portfolio of labor programming worldwide, and represents USAID in inter-agency policy discussions on labor. She has twenty years’ experience on international labor issues, trade, development and ethical business practices. She previously worked for the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF), International Labour Organization, and American Center for International Labor Solidarity. She has developed and led multi-country projects in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia on the rights of working women, on labor law implementation, on forced and child labor, and on supply chain due diligence. hile at ILRF, she worked extensively on a project to raise awareness of, and promote solutions to, gender-based violence in the workplace worldwide. She served as one of the founding Board members of the Sweatfree Purchasing Consortium, an entity serving state and city governments in the United States who have adopted legislative or executive commitments to ethical procurement. In 2009 she was appointed by Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to a special Consultative Group on Forced and Child Labor.
Thalia Kidder- Senior Advisor Women’s Economic Rights, Oxfam
Thalia Kidder is Senior Advisor Women’s Economic Rights at Oxfam, where she currently leads Oxfam's work on women's economic empowerment and care including developing the Rapid Care Analysis exercises for development programs and advocacy. She has coordinated learning initiatives on Women's Economic Leadership in agricultural markets in East Asia and Latin America, and advised Researching Women's Collective Action, as part of Oxfam's Gendered Enterprise and Markets initiative. Over 17 years, based in both Latin America and the head office in Oxford, UK, her work has also included women workers' rights in the Make Trade Fair campaign, Trading Away our Rights, and gender analysis for Oxfam GB's microfinance programming in Central America and the Caribbean, West Africa, and South Asia. She has facilitated numerous workshops on “how change happens” and on improving the quality of Oxfam's advisory service ("Thinking about change for development practice"). Prior to joining Oxfam, Thalia worked as a community and labor organizer in the USA and Central America.
Nurul Ameen Siddiquee - Technical Advisor, Sustainable Agriculture, CARE USA
Nurul Ameen Siddiquee is the Technical Advisor for the CARE USA Food and Nutrition Security team. In this role he supports CARE USA’s women-focused agriculture program, Pathways, in six countries of South East Asia and Africa. He also provides technical and programmatic support to Pathways and contributes to the CARE USA agriculture strategy more broadly, related to climate-smart agriculture with a specific focus on addressing constraints and opportunities of the CARE impact groups, specifically women and youth. He also focuses on developing appropriate guidance notes and approaches to programming, and ensures the systematic sharing of lessons across Pathways countries as well as CARE’s global Agriculture portfolio with peers and partners.
Erin Markel - Principal Consultant, Economic Empowerment, MarketShare Associates and Co-facilitator of The SEEP Network’s WEE WG
Categories: Women and Girls Women's Economic Empowerment English Unpublished Resources Published Blogs/Webinars Webinar Womens Economic Empowerment Webinar Resources WebinarsBlogs
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