Lessons Learned and Not Yet Learned from a Multicountry Initiative on Women's Economic Empowerment

doi:10.1596/978-1-4648-0068-9

Publication:
Lessons Learned and Not Yet Learned from a Multicountry Initiative on Women's Economic Empowerment

dc.contributor.author	Johansson de Silva, Sara
dc.contributor.author	Paci, Pierella
dc.contributor.author	Posadas, Josefina
dc.date.accessioned	2013-12-11T21:13:02Z
dc.date.available	2013-12-11T21:13:02Z
dc.date.issued	2014
dc.description.abstract	The Results-Based Initiatives (RBI), launched in 2007, were a pioneering attempt to provide comprehensive, coherent, and rigorous evidence on effective interventions to foster the economic empowerment of women. The RBI comprised five small pilots with built-in impact evaluation designed to identify what works best in promoting better outcomes for women as entrepreneurs, wage earners or farmers, under different country contexts. The program was an innovative experiment in an important policy area. While there is a clear rationale for policy interventions to help remove constraints to women’s economic empowerment, knowledge of what interventions work best in different settings remains limited. When the RBI were conceived, rigorous evidence in this area was close to nonexistent because no systematic impact evaluations had been carried out in developing countries. However, the RBI fell short of meeting several of their ambitious objectives. This study highlights lessons from the RBI with respect to both the impact of the interventions and dos and don’ts in the design and implementation of pilots. Regarding the impact on economic opportunities, the interventions did not generally increase women’s earnings, with the exception of the Peru pilot. However, women who received training generally appreciated the access to new information and felt their skills and their involvement in business associations and networks had increased. However, it would be wrong to conclude that these interventions were not effective. The lack of robust positive impact may be due to the evaluations being conducted too soon to show fully the long-term effects of the interventions, or to problems in the design, implementation, or measurement of pilot outcomes. In particular, there was a clear need of an “early warning system” to synchronize the corrections in the interventions with the design of the impact evaluation. The RBI were overambitious regarding what could be achieved with a limited budget and a short time frame.	en
dc.identifier.doi	10.1596/978-1-4648-0068-9
dc.identifier.isbn	978-1-4648-0068-9
dc.identifier.other	10.1596/978-1-4648-0068-9
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/10986/16377
dc.language.iso	en_US
dc.publisher	Washington, DC: World Bank
dc.relation.ispartofseries	World Bank Study;
dc.rights	CC BY 3.0 IGO
dc.rights.holder	World Bank
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/igo
dc.subject	business development
dc.subject	discrimination
dc.subject	economic empowerment
dc.subject	entrepreneurship
dc.subject	gender
dc.subject	impact evaluation
dc.subject	monitoring and evaluation
dc.subject	pilots
dc.subject	randamized
dc.subject	skills
dc.subject	training
dc.subject	women
dc.title	Lessons Learned and Not Yet Learned from a Multicountry Initiative on Women's Economic Empowerment	en
dspace.entity.type	Publication
okr.crosscuttingsolutionarea	Jobs
okr.crosscuttingsolutionarea	Gender
okr.date.disclosure	2013-12-11
okr.doctype	Publications & Research::Publication
okr.doctype	Publications & Research
okr.globalpractice	Social Protection and Labor
okr.globalpractice	Education
okr.globalpractice	Governance
okr.identifier.doi	10.1596/978-1-4648-0068-9
okr.language.supported	en
okr.peerreview	Academic Peer Review
okr.region.country	Cambodia
okr.region.country	Egypt, Arab Republic of
okr.region.country	Kenya
okr.region.country	Lao People's Democratic Republic
okr.region.country	Liberia
okr.region.country	Peru
okr.topic	Gender::Gender and Economics
okr.topic	Public Sector Development
okr.topic	Social Protections and Labor::Child Labor
okr.topic	Social Protections and Labor::Labor Markets
okr.topic	Social Protections and Labor::Labor Policies
okr.topic	Social Protections and Labor::Skills Development and Labor Force Training
okr.unit	PRMGE
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