Integrating Gender and Including Women in Value Chain Development (Training Materials)

Public and private sector leaders, international donors, and human rights advocates agree on the importance of promoting women’s economic empowerment. During recent years growing evidence shows that empowering women not only advances human rights but is also smart economics. But how, specifically, can this empowerment be accomplished? This training presents concrete recommendations and tools that development professionals can use to facilitate the effective integration of women into growing market systems and to support women in achieving empowerment. The training is expected to take about 1.5 to 2 days to deliver.

OBJECTIVES

• To learn how to apply a gender lens to designing and managing value chain projects using a facilitation approach
• To understand the importance of ensuring the inclusion of women in market systems throughout the project cycle

INTENDED AUDIENCE
The ideal audiences for this training are program designers or implementers who have some familiarity with value-chain and market systems development. Some basic training or familiarity with gender and development is also ideal, but not required.

HOW TO USE THIS TRAINING GUIDE
This training facilitation guide is accompanied by a PowerPoint slide deck, sample training agenda, eight handouts, and a training evaluation form for participants to fill out after completing the training. This facilitation guide includes comprehensive, step-by-step guidance for each of the sessions. There are also detailed notes in the PowerPoint slide deck that complement the explanations and discussion points that are in this guide. In addition, facilitators can reference the links to additional references that are included at the end of each session. Facilitators are welcome to substitute the case studies and examples included in this guide with case studies and examples that are more relevant to the country or project context in which they are working.