Research on Women’s Economic Empowerment in East Africa

Kore Global worked together with The Global Centre for Gender Equality at Stanford University (under a Gates Foundation grant) in 2019 and 2020 to conduct an extensive study on women’s economic empowerment policies, programs, research and data in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. As part of this work, the team has also provided high quality, up to date, rigorous technical advisory services to the Gates Foundation’s Women’s Economic Empowerment team through a help desk mechanism. We have undertaken various rapid reviews of the impact of COVID-19, including on on private child care provision in East Africa and the implications for girls’ education and women’s economic empowerment, and on the effects-19 of COVID on WEE in Kenya, with a particular focus on understanding the barriers and enablers to work and livelihoods (which utilised Kore Global’s socio-ecological WEE Conceptual Framework™ to map and analyze evidence against 5 main domains: individual, household, community, market and state).

Following this landscaping phase, we designed and implemented focused research on women’s economic empowerment in Kenya during 2020 and 2021. This research sought to move the women’s economic empowerment agenda forward by presenting a feminist conceptual framework for analyzing women’s entrepreneurship that identifies 3 sets of constraints - individual, normative and structural - that act as barriers to women’s economic empowerment. We argue that women’s capabilities and agency at the individual (and collective) level are constrained by norms and structures, and that these ‘structures of constraint’ impede women’s participation in market activities and push them into lower earning activities when they do participate.

Using Kore Global’s  socio-ecological WEE Conceptual Framework™, we explored the interplay of choice and constraint in women’s efforts to achieve greater economic empowerment through enterprise creation and ownership in Kenya. We identified the range and magnitude of constraints, and the extent to which, and how, economic development and livelihood programmes in Kenya address these constraints and support the economic empowerment of women entrepreneurs in the informal sector. We presented concrete examples of how programmes are addressing - and failing to address - individual normative and structural constraints to WEE. We provided suggestions for a more feminist and comprehensive approach to supporting women informal entrepreneurs in Kenya, enabling greater transformation, and identified areas where future experimentation and evaluation on effectiveness would be helpful.