Working with the Private Sector to Empower Women: How to Build the Business Case for Change

Jul 24, 2019 | by The SEEP Network

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The private sector is an essential partner in the process of women’s economic empowerment. By adopting business practices that include and support women as workers, consumers, producers and suppliers, firms can not only make an important contribution to the process of women’s economic empowerment, but also expand their market, achieve greater business efficiency, and improve their bottom line. A business case can help firms understand why women’s inclusion and empowerment is important for their mission and values, business model and stakeholders. However a compelling case can be hard to develop. The approach must be pragmatic, relevant and tailored to the country context, constraints facing women, the sector in question and the specific interests of private sector partners. In this webinar, speakers from the Arab Women’s Enterprise Fund (AWEF) and BSR presented diverse approaches, tools, data and metrics that can be used to build a compelling business case to the private sector. As part of this webinar, AWEF also launched its first Practitioner Learning Brief, Working with the Private Sector to Empower Women: What to Measure and How to Build the Business Case for Change.

Moderator

Adriano Scarampi, MRM Advisor, AWEF & Advisory Practice Lead, MarketShare Associates

Adriano is an M4P and results measurement expert, and has led and provided strategic and operational advice to market systems development programmes in 9 countries, across Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. Adriano has a particular interest in behavioral economics and unpacking the drivers that shape consumer and business behavior. He has led several social norms research and diagnostic studies for market systems development programmes, supporting implementers making sense of complex drivers of behaviors and using these to strengthen their private sector engagement strategies. He is an economist by academic background, and a trained management consultant.

Speakers

Julia Hakspiel, Learning Manager, AWEF & Managing Consultant, MarketShare Associates

Julia has provided technical assistance and strategic advice in the areas of economic development, gender and trade to clients such as DFID, GIZ, Gatsby Africa, EIF, IFC, ITC, WTO, World Bank and USAID. Her experience spans policy development, programme design, management and evaluation, and research. She has experience working in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, DRC, Mozambique and Nigeria. She has published a number of articles on the topics of gender, trade, services and regulatory reform and co-founded an award winning social enterprise that disseminates trade and market information to SMEs engaged in trade in the EAC using mobile technology. Julia holds an MSc in Development Studies from the London School of Economics.

Margaux Yost, Manager, HERproject, BSR

Margaux Yost is the global lead for HERproject’s health pillar and oversees the program’s expansion in East Africa by working on addressing women’s rights and needs in supply chains, strengthening multistakeholder partnerships to open industry-level roundtable dialogues and developing HERproject’s monitoring and evaluation framework and approach. She also supports BSR’s wider women’s empowerment practice by applying a gender-sensitive lens to research and social auditing methodologies and conducting field research in frontier markets. Margaux has global health experience in program management, design, and monitoring and evaluation, with a particular interest in behavior change communication development programs. Her expertise draws from field experience as a health advisor in the U.S. Peace Corps and social research and program management positions at M&C Saatchi World Services, The Hunger Project, and the International Medical Corps.

This webinar was hosted by The SEEP Network in collaboration with the Arab Women's Enterprise Fund, as a part of the Women's Economic Empowerment in Market Systems Learning Series.