How can business most effectively support women’s economic empowerment, through their value chains and beyond?

On Q4 and systemic change, we know that as well as economic or technical challenges, issues such as lack of healthcare or education, social norms and practices, status and gender discrimination can prevent poor people from participating in value chains. Enabling poor people to successfully participate in value chains requires a systemic approach that addresses the range of obstacles holding them back. By making poor people’s participation more effective and sustainable, this systemic approach will strengthen the value chain as a whole, to the benefit of all participants throughout the value chain. For instance, women’s access to finance is a key area where regulatory and social norms play important roles in restricting women. Current models of change in the value chain e.g. of having a lead company, often don't go far enough in bringing together the very wide range of stakeholders needed to make the change. Donor and NGO led market systems approaches are probably better at this, but tend not to be doing the work across the global value chains that Stephanie Barrientos highlighted earlier.