How can we strengthen collaboration in support of women and girl empowerment?

Invite new players to enter a broader global development domain with a shared interest of empowering women. Encourage different approaches, perspectives, solutions, products and services that may not hold women’s empowerment as an explicit objective, gender transformative effects of innovation none the less emerge.

Sports as a tool to develop leadership for girls and women is innovative in the context of many developing economies / countries.

It challenges social norms and bring about visible change, in the context of the Goal Programme its ultimate aim is to both create financial literacy but also increasingly produce some level of economic resilience in girls and women

I think that vocational training of adolescent girls in non -traditional jobs is an great opportunity , business can offer. Not as a one off activity, but together with other stakeholders make it a permanent program in a given area. So it is key that companies look beyond their company level and align with others in a particular country.

Great question as there is innovation in this space but a lot more we can do. One key point for innovation is to design with girls as your goal. Don’t assume that generic or general youth initiatives will actually reach girls. In Helmand, Afghanistan, Mercy Corps works with private businesses in the Introducing New Vocational Education and Skills Training (INVEST) initiative. Girls attend five female-only vocational training centres. Over 6000 girls have increased their marketable skills to date. Girls engage in more than 30 technical courses that respond directly to the needs of the local economy that adjust based on the changing business needs. Business leaders and business owners act as classroom instructors to sync labor market demand and pivots according to market needs. We also expand the professional and social networks of girls who have limited social capital. External and internal evaluations demonstrated a six month post-graduation employment rate of 74%. We have also opened the first women-only markets in Helmand.

Mercy Corps' Gaza Sky Geeks project - supporting internet start ups even in a challenging environment including young women entrepreneurs is really successful and now set up a crowdfunding.

That's a very inspiring quote, Kate!

Our team has been in the field working with girls in our target markets aiming to understand their barriers and constraints, what they care about, how they are thinking, what they do spend their resources on, to inform our call for entries in the SPRING accelerator and our approach to reviewing applications. I think that part of innovation in this arena is very much about human centered design approaches married with business resources and human capital that can bring things to scale.

To give another NGO a plug, Aflatoun - www.aflatoun.org - also have a great set of resources in the form of their financial and life skills curricula. Plan are working to adapt these to local contexts in the four countries in which our new partnership is operating, but it's a fantastic foundation from which to start and a great complement to our existing work.

The power and strength of story telling and telling real stories about women in their communities. This is essential for educating the public at large about the structural barriers associated with poverty which stifles community development, wellbeing, access to food, water and education. Girl Rising documentary is a great example of that.

GAIN (the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition) engages with business to improve nutrition of children and women as well as contributing to women empowerment.

Here are a few project examples :

- We support women self help groups in Rajasthan, India to produce fortified supplementary foods. Women producers are empowered both economically and socially

- In Bangladesh, we work in the garment industry with other partners, to improve nutrition and health status of the female workers (with food supplementation and SBCC). aiming to demonstrate a return-on-investment for the employers, so that they will finance the interventions going forward

- In Cote d' Ivoire we support a woman-led SME that produces amongst others fortified complementary food for children 6-24 months.

- I'm very interested to work on improving lives, nutrition and health of adolescent girls. What are their motivations - how can we address longer-term goals with interventions that have also short-term benefits?

Marti van Liere

GAIN- Geneva

Well, as Maria and both know, sports is a massively innovative tool that is still not mainstream when it comes to empowering women and girls. But if you think about it, it makes SO much sense:

1. creates a safe space for girls to relax and insulated from physical/sexual abuse

2. gives them ownership of their bodies -- something which girls are oftentimes told to be embarrassed about.

3. provides a channel through which they can practice the skills they learn -- communications/leadership

4. it's FUN!

5. It can change social norms subtlely -- seeing girls being srtong, confident, and athletic on the field changes societal perceptions of who and what girls are.

Hi everyone congrats on this important discussion.

On one hand we need to make a convincing case for why business should support and invest in women. At the same time we can't forget the human rights dimension and the increasing engagement of business in fulfilling its basic obligations as well as an increasing interest in doing good. This reflects growing recognition that from the boardroom to the garment factory women have rights to equal participation in the economy, in business, in educational and training opportunities. This is not to mention the rights of women and girls in communities where international businesses operate. Please see this blog I wrote about why it matters for companies based on a report for input into the UN Human Rights Council. http://community.businessfightspoverty.org/profiles/blogs/women-bus...

It is also important to think about the scale at which companies, NGO/foundations and government initiatives support women's entrepreneurship and business efforts. I have been interviewing a number of women entrepreneurs in developing countries over the last days and several rightly point out that there is a lot of attention to micro-finance and getting women starting small businesses but little support for scaling up and growing. Additionally, over the past few years I have interviewed women in senior management in NGOs, small medium and large businesses around the world who talk about initiatives to get women into leadership but a lack of support structures to help them once there. This is important especially since research shows that women are often given opportunities for leadership in times of crisis. This means that they come into leadership, whether of a farmers collective or a corporation, with large challenges to face thus affecting their success rates especially if they are not given proper support.

Ama Marston, Marston Consulting

I think it's great that UN Women are calling for a solidarity movement for gender equality. It's taking the issues that are normally led by women for women to ask one half of humanity to support the other half of humanity. The HeForShe Commitment requires men to agree that gender equality is not only a women’s issue, it is a human rights issue. Please go to www.heforshe.org and support the call for solidarity.

And how do we ensure that girls' and womens' voices are adequately represented? We need to be speaking with them, not for them. Again, worth checking out Plan's latest report on empowering adolescent girls - http://bit.ly/11uKeSH

Payal,

Great point! It is great to see this discussion started with the idea that the business case is clear. We need to get that message out more broadly ie. The business case is made -now here is what we can DO.

Hi Safiye, we did a report on Coca-Cola's 5by20 programme with Havard Kennedy School's CSR Initiaitve that you might find interesting: http://snipbfp.org/1gyKFM9

ICRW wrote a solid report on this topic in 2009 - Innovation for Women's Empowerment and Gender Equality

Create Innovation Systems: Innovation systems are defined by the relationships between all of the actors, ideas and processes needed for innovations to be created, adopted and diffused. Key is bringing diverse actors together challenges the boundaries of knowledge, disciplines and sectors in ways that can champion innovative practices.

1. BREAK BOUNDARIES FOR STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS

2. ENGAGE WOMEN IN DESIGN AND DIFFUSION

3. CULTIVATE CHAMPIONS

4. CREATE “BUZZ” TO MAKE IT “STICK”

5. CAPITALIZE ON OPPORTUNE TIMING AND CONTEXT

6. TARGET EFFORTS TO REACH POOR WOMEN

7. SYNERGIZE TOP-DOWN AND BOTTOM-UP

I agree. Access to finance, especially to entrepreneurs, is critical -- both for their own growth but also greater economic growth. There are SO many challenges to accessing credit -- from KYC laws to legal issues surrounding collateral to lack of credit bureaus. I still haven't come across a scaleable solution to access to credit in general...although I've seen some interesting pilots in the space for women entrepreneurs.

I know the IFC has created a lending facility for women owned businesses and Goldman is playing a supporting role...so infrastructure like that is a start.

Thanks Safiye. Yes, it's across our value chain across the globe. I've always known that women are amazing and it's been great to see this through 5by20. Our South Africa program is one of 44 across countries around the world, which has reached about 550 000 women at the end of 2013 and we're going exponential!

Yes and I think Nike's Girl Declaration is a great start -- creating programs for girls by girls. and project SPRING seems to be aiming to do the same thing, which is fabulous.