Marketlinks Celebrates International Women’s Day 2020

Sunday, March 8, 2020, is International Women’s Day. International Women’s Day is a “global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating gender parity.”

The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is I am Generation Equality: Realizing Women’s Rights. Below are some previous blog posts from Marketlinks that detail the advancement of gender equality worldwide. 

• What Can Be Achieved in Women's Economic Empowerment?: Early Lessons and Examples from Operationalizing a Women's Economic Empowerment Framework in a Multi-country Context
  This case study explores the evolution of Women's Economic Empowerment (WEE) in Market Development Facility. The project has been operational over an important time for WEE in market systems and has evolved with the field while developing unique operational implementation approaches. This paper aims to contribute to the broader conversation of how market system programs grapple with and can contribute to WEE.
• Women's Economic Empowerment and Savings Groups Resources
  This blog post introduces a series of resources that examine the pathways between Savings Groups and women's empowerment, the evidence with respect to various outcome areas, and how women's empowerment outcomes can be enhanced and better sustained through Savings Groups. 
• Practical Tools and Frameworks for Measuring Agency in Women's Economic Empowerment
  There is increasing interest from economic programs to better understand, measure, and capture agency across interventions to more deliberately pursue WEE. Yet, there are many challenges in integrating agency in program planning and design, and specifically in measuring its impact. This brief identifies and analyzes the different techniques practitioners use to measure agency in programs that promote WEE. It provides frameworks and tools that have been tried and tested, with insights on learnings, good practices, and challenges. 
• Resource: Confronting Organisational Challenges to Mainstreaming Women’s Economic Empowerment in Market Systems Development Programs
  This case study, Confronting Organisational Challenges to Mainstreaming Women’s Economic Empowerment in Market Systems Development Programs: Lessons from AIP-Rural, adds new insights into existing guidance on WEE in MSD. It examines widespread challenges to effective WEE mainstreaming in MSD programs and provides examples of how the Australia-Indonesia Partnership for Rural Economic Development has tackled some of these challenges. 
• Let Women Work: Regulatory Issues and Wage Employment
  Besides needing the right skills and information about job opportunities, there are often significant legal and regulatory barriers and gaps that systematically cut women out of wage work in USAID’s host countries. This blog highlights these barriers that women face around the world. 

We want to wish all of our readers a Happy International Women’s Day! If you’d like more information about how Marketlinks champions women, check out our WEE topic page.