December 24, 2014
Empowering women: Good business and beyond

By Paloma Durán,  Sustainable Development Goals Fund director

According to the recently published UN’s Millennium Development Goals Report 2014, the world has made great progresses on the MDG3.  However, significant gender gaps still remain and women continue to face discrimination, especially in areas of education, work, and participation in public affairs. Two-thirds of the world’s illiterate adults are female and over 65% of its poorest people are women and girls. Therefore, advancing gender equality is still essential to the eradication of poverty and sustainable development.

A multi-dimensional issue, gender inequality is deeply rooted in economic and cultural structures of societies and thus requires comprehensive approaches. A critical aspect of addressing gender inequality is the empowerment of women, which involves expanding women’s choices and ensuring their capacities and access to resources to exercise those choices.

Working closely with governments, civil society and the private sector, the MDG Achievement Fund (MDG-F) has pioneered a dual strategy to achieving gender equality: programmes specifically targeting gender equality and women’s empowerment but, at the same time, ensuring that the rest of our development efforts promote equal opportunities for women and men, girls and boys.

Through technical training and civic capacity strengthening as well as direct financial support such as seed capital, startup grants, and microcredit loans, the MDG-F was able to help rural indigenous women groups fully exercise their citizenship rights and develop income-generative opportunities.

In Bolivia, 12,817 women obtained birth certificates and identification cards for the first time, which enabled them to apply for bank loans and exercise their right to vote. When the programme started, only 27% of women were voting, but when it finished 97% were taking part in local and national electoral processes. A third of the women entrepreneurs who participated in training sessions were nominated for electoral lists. 60% of them were elected.

In the Ethiopian region of Tigray, where women have little access to financial, medical, educational, and social support systems, the MDG-F’s “Leave No Woman Behind” programme provided loans, literacy training, and business skills to help vulnerable women support themselves and their families. These services have helped more than 32,560 women improve their participation in the economic sector.

Investing in empowering women is also good business for the private sector. Reports of MDG-F programmes show that gains in women’s income are linked to increased family saving and expending, which means bigger market potentials. In Upper Egypt (SALASEL)and Viet Nam, the programmes facilitated linkages between local women cooperatives and exporting sectors in terms of product and new market development. With adequate technical training, women become highly skilled labor source, leading to healthier and more productive economic development. Also, when women are economically empowered, they contribute to the overall well-being of local communities in terms of better nutrition and children education, among others. This could serve as an effective way for companies to build more equal and thriving societies.

Beyond that, improved economic conditions and access to civic rights also resulted in women’s better participation in the public affairs and decision-making process, which facilitated an attitudinal change on issues of gender equality in various contexts. 

There is no perfect recipe to creating programmes that will solve gender inequality. One needs to understand the problem in the context of society to effectively improve the quality of life for women everywhere. The private sector, together with NGOs and governments, are key actors in addressing the structural causes of gender inequality. With the future SDGs, it is expected that the private sector will take on a more visible role.  By increasing private sector’s participation, the quality of life for society as a whole will improve, as it will be improving the lives of half the population, women. Based on the successful experience of the MDG-F joint programmes, the newly founded SDG-F tends to put gender and women’s empowerment as a cross-cutting priority in all areas of its work and seek more innovative forms of partnership with the private sector to build sustainable, inclusive, and blooming business models.