From the Women's Economic Empowerment: A Roadmap website:
Design challenges are common to most program evaluations, but this is especially true for programs that measure women's economic empowerment. This is because of the interdependence between women's economic and social roles, which influences their business choices and returns to those businesses. For example, because women have significant family responsibilities, they may have different goals for their businesses, such as less growth but the option to work from home. This makes the choice of measures used to capture empowerment particularly complex.
Building on the results of the Roadmap report (2013), the United Nations Foundation and the ExxonMobil Foundation commissioned five expert researchers to produce independent think pieces on distinct economic empowerment measurement topics.
In 2014, the foundations convened the researchers to discuss their recommendations and identify a common set of widely applicable outcome measures across two categories: urban women entrepreneurs and business leaders, and rural women entrepreneurs and farmers.
- Evaluating Skills and Capital Transfer Programs Targeted to Women Not in Stable Employment (Young and/or Ultrapoor), Oriana Bandiera (PDF)
- Preferred Outcome Measures for Interventions to Increase the Earnings and Productivity of Rural Women, James C. Knowles (PDF)
- Measuring Empowerment of Rural Women Farmers and Producers: What Can We Learn From a Gender and Assets Perspective? Agnes R. Quisumbing, Nancy Johnson, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, and Cheryl Doss (PDF)
- Business Development Services for Female Entrepreneurship for Female Entrepreneurship: A Think Note on Measurement Outcomes, Martin Valdivia (PDF)
- Measuring Well-being of Female Entrepreneurs: Thoughts on Measuring Outcomes, Christopher Woodruff (PDF)
The Measuring Women's Economic Empowerment report (2015), a companion to the Roadmap report, summarizes recommended measures to assess intermediate, direct, and final outcomes of women's economic empowerment programs.
In addition, an M&E Guidelines document was produced that includes questionnaire modules for each of the outcomes discussed.
- Monitoring and Evaluation Guidelines for Women's Economic Empowerment Programs: Report Prepared by James C. Knowles (PDF)
- Suggested Questionnaire Modules for Measuring Women's Economic Empowerment Outcome Indicators (PDF)
This work was presented at an event at the Center for Global Development on June 16. A video of the event is available here.
More information on the project is available here: www.womeneconroadmap.org/measurement.
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