Today, I am giving a talk at the World Bank on the topic of Women and Economic Development. Since I anticipate needing to refer to some of my previous reports and that some in the audience might wish to follow up on the references, I am putting direct links to a few select pieces here.
This is the cover of the report on the “Lessons Learned from Years of Practice” of nine multinational corporations working on women’s economic empowerment.
I will be distributing the report launched at Chatham House this past November, which details the learning of the Global Business Coalition for Women’s Economic Empowerment. I will probably run out of copies, so anyone can download the PDF below:
There is a lot of interest at the World Bank on integrating women into supply chains. We did three reports as part of an Oxford study on Walmart’s Empowering Women Together. Two of these reports are on African enterprises and one is on a US enterprise. However, they were written as a set and it is instructive to compare them because people tend to assume that certain systems common in developed countries are present in developing situations—that is not the case and it makes a big difference for planning. Those reports are available, as follows:
There was also an extensive literature review about measuring “what works” as part of the Walmart project we did. The studies done were found to be inapplicable to a real-life market situation. The article in front of the bibliography explains why.
I also did a joint report with the Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan on integrating smallholder farmers into large supply chains. That can be accessed here:
The speech today will talk about some of the things that stand in women’s way that are not barriers for men. Often, people don’t realize these barriers even exist. This case study below looks at how bank socializing practices hinder women entrepreneurs’ access to finance in China. Since writing this case, I have seen similar practices all over the world (instead of Karaoke, it’s sauna or something else that effectively shuts the women out).
When I give an introductory speech on gender and economics, I often anticipate that someone is going to ask me whether women and men have different brains. I did a white paper on this topic for the IFC about 18 months or so ago. It can be downloaded here;
There is also a set of case studies on the CARE rural sales distribution system in Bangladesh. I am thinking this may also be of interest to people working on such systems.
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