Public-private partnerships can be a powerful approach to promote inclusive and sustainable development outcomes and to identify shared interests for development and private sector stakeholders. Private sector partners bring a wide range of expertise, resources and innovative approaches to development challenges that can complement the efforts of development actors (USAID Private-Sector Engagement Policy 2022). Together, the public and private sector can design and implement sustainable, market-based tactics that address some of the most pressing inclusive development challenges, all while creating jobs and improving access to resources, services and opportunities.

Over the years, Advancing Women’s Empowerment (AWE) has featured a number of perspectives and programming examples where the private sector has been a key partner in inclusive and sustainable development. Two key themes have emerged from this work:

Working with the private sector can promote social norms change and economic benefits

Social and gender norms — the informal rules in society that define what is expected of men and women — underpin and influence who has access to resources, services and opportunities, and how men and women participate in and benefit from agriculture and food systems. Shifting harmful social and gender norms is essential to address systemic and structural barriers that prevent women, youth and other marginalized groups from fully realizing their potential in agriculture and food systems.

The private sector has an important role to play, not just in supporting economic empowerment, but also in working with development partners to promote changes that encourage healthier, more equitable social norms, such as preventing, mitigating and responding to gender-based violence, increasing access to land for female farmers and expanding equitable access to agricultural inputs. For example, the Feed the Future Mozambique Agricultural Innovations (Feed the Future Inova) Activity leveraged its understanding of social and gender norms to advise agricultural input partners on more gender-responsive and inclusive approaches to input distribution and marketing, such as featuring women’s testimonials in their radio ads and reaching women directly on their farms through a village-based agro-agent network.

The Integrated Land and Resource Governance (ILRG) program worked with women self-help groups in West Bengal, India, to improve women’s access to land through land leasing groups and provided land literacy training and agronomic training, which increased women’s agency and incomes, challenging norms around access to and control over land, and increasing women’s confidence as farmers in their own right. Addressing the barriers to women’s land access and improving access to agronomic training brought more women into the PepsiCo potato supply chain, which boosted PepsiCo’s supply of potatoes for its Lays brand.

More examples of successful public-private partnerships that have delivered both norms change and economic benefits include:

• The Private Sector: An Ally in the Fight Against GBV in Agriculture?
• Increasing Women’s Access to Land through Public-Private Partnerships in Ghana

Working with the private sector offers opportunities and incentives for scaling inclusive development approaches and outcomes

“Scaling up” broadly means to expand, replicate, adapt and sustain successful policies, programs and interventions to reach a greater number of people for more sustainable impact. Taking successful approaches “to scale” is essential to increase women’s economic empowerment, particularly in agriculture, where women make up more than half of the global workforce, to ensure sustainable livelihoods.

Private sector partners often have a longstanding presence and interest in a particular region and industry and, as such, present an opportunity for sustainability and to scale what works. Over the years, AWE has learned about what it takes to achieve scale in women’s empowerment activities, for example, engaging local stakeholders — including private financing — developing a gender strategy, human and financial resources to implement the strategy, and gender-sensitive monitoring and evaluation.

More considerations for scaling inclusive development approaches and outcomes were discussed in the two-part series below:

• Are We There Yet? The Quest for Women’s Economic Empowerment at Scale in Agricultural Market Systems, Part 1: Incentivizing the Private Sector
• Are We There Yet? The Quest for Women’s Economic Empowerment at Scale in Agricultural Market Systems, Part 2: Beyond Partnerships

USAID, and the broader development field, continues to shift toward public-private partnerships to catalyze sustainable and inclusive development. As evidenced through the programmatic examples that AWE has featured over the years, public-private partnerships have the potential to address inclusive development challenges in meaningful and sustainable ways for years to come. For further reading, there are additional resources and tools related to private sector engagement and women’s economic empowerment available in the newsletter “tool corner.”