This paper focuses on the economic empowerment of poor and very poor women and girls.

There is a substantial body of work on women’s economic empowerment (WEE) as a whole. This identifies a wide range of factors that can enable or constrain women’s economic empowerment. Some of these are  structural  or  macro  factors,  for  example  discriminatory  social  norms  and  the  embedding  of patriarchy into institutions, including market characteristics and laws. Others are factors may enable women to drive change, such as collective action and leadership. Others still are to do with women’s own  ability  to  earn  and  control  income,  assets  and  capabilities,  including  their  education,  skills development and training, access to property, assets and financial services, social protection, access to quality, decent paid work and their unpaid care and work burdens.  Advice  on  the  practical  interventions  to  enable  WEE  is  rarely  disaggregated  by  the  intersecting inequalities that magnify poverty and inequality. As such, it fails to address the significant barriers to WEE for chronically poor women. This paper seeks to fill this gap in the literature

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Author: Kate Bird