Inclusive Development: Examples of Engaging the Private Sector to Increase Women’s Empowerment
Engaging the private sector is an important part of increasing women’s empowerment and wellbeing. The private sector is a source of jobs, offtaking and skill-building opportunities. In agriculture, a thriving private sector can be the difference between subsistence farming and economic growth for countries, communities and individuals.
But to have these positive impacts, private sector engagement must also be inclusive. Over the last few years, the Advancing Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture (AWE) Program has explored how different USAID projects are finding ways to work with the private sector to increase women’s economic empowerment. For this year's gender theme month, we want to re-share a few of our past learning experiences, highlighting the importance of gender inclusion in economic development and showcasing projects that have successfully found shared value with the private sector. We hope these examples will provide useful knowledge for you to apply to your own activities!
In this post, part one of a two-part series, we highlight approaches that incentivize private sector partners to consider women’s needs. Using real-world examples, we show how projects and partners in different countries find ways to engage the private sector in inclusion and women’s empowerment at scale.
In this Q&A, USAID’s Sarah Lowery and Corinne Hart share how PepsiCo is helping USAID make the business case for women’s empowerment in West Bengal where they have PepsiCo local staff and agronomists providing trainings to women in the potato supply chain, equipping them to take on the role of community agronomists, and supporting women’s self-help groups access land leases to grow PepsiCo potatoes.
In this post, we share lessons learned from the first round of our ongoing learning series, where USAID stakeholders identified success factors for successful private sector engagement in gender equality and agriculture.
Increasing Women's Access to Land through Public-Private Partnerships in Ghana
An important part of improving value chain competitiveness is to create sustainable opportunities for women. This requires increasing women’s land ownership and decision-making power. In Ghana, where land ownership traditionally passes down through the male family line, the Feed the Future Agricultural Development and Value Chain Enhancement activity addressed this issue with a multipronged, participatory approach.
This post focuses on how understanding gender norms and gendered decision-making can help the private sector increase women’s use of improved agricultural inputs. Based on a study conducted by the Feed the Future Agricultural Innovations Activity in Mozambique, this post shares lessons learned on how private sector agricultural input providers can better reach women with their products.
The Private Sector: An Ally in the Fight Against GBV in Agriculture?
Gender-based violence (GBV) is a social, moral and economic problem. For businesses, costs associated with GBV include absenteeism, loss of productivity and time spent outside of work at court or participating in services for survivors. Yet, businesses may be hesitant to get involved in addressing GBV. This post provides an overview of this issue and examples of working with the private sector to address GBV.
Practical Approaches to Youth and Women’s Inclusion in Market Systems
In 2020, AWE held a webinar discussing the findings from our landscape analysis and case studies on women and youth inclusion in agricultural market systems where we were joined by RisiAlbania and ELAN RDC, two of the activities featured in the case studies. In this post, we share the lively Q&A from the webinar, taking a deeper dive into the landscape analysis findings and real-world experience of working with the private sector to increase gender and youth inclusion in market systems development activities.
