MakingItIndustry for Development

4th quarter 2011

Wecandoit!

n The end of growth?n UN Women’s

Michelle Bacheletn South African Hydrogen energy

to the rescue?n Paul Polak

A quarterly magazine. Stimulating, criticaland constructive. A forum for discussionand exchange about the intersection ofindustry and development.

NUMBER 1, DECEMBER 2009lWe must let nature inspire us –Gunter Pauli presents analternative business model that isenvironmentally friendly andsustainable lHot Topic: Is itpossible to have prosperitywithout growth? Is ‘green growth’really possible?

NUMBER 2, APRIL 2010lThe International EnergyAgency’s Nobuo Tanaka looks atenergy transitions for industry l Energy for all – KandehYumkella and Leena Srivastavaon what needs to be done toimprove energy access

NUMBER 3, JULY 2010l China’s stunning economicrise: interview with minister ofcommerce, Chen Deming l Towards a more productivedebate – Ha-Joon Chang calls foran acceptance that industrialpolicy can work

NUMBER 4, NOVEMBER 2010l Strengthening productivecapacity – Cheick Sidi Diarraargues that the LDCs should –and can – produce more, andbetter quality, goods l PatriciaFrancis on climate change andtrade l Hot topic: The relevanceof entrepreneurship

NUMBER 5, FEBRUARY 2011lA window of opportunity forworld trade? – Peter Sutherlandassesses the prospects for theconclusion of a multilateral tradeagreement l A path to mutualprosperity –Xiao Ye on tradebetween sub-Saharan Africa andChina

NUMBER 6, APRIL 2011l Feeding a crowded world –IFAD’s Kanayo Nwanze arguesthat smallholder farmers musthave opportunities to beentrepreneurs l Nestlé CEOPaul Bulcke on ‘Creating SharedValue’ l Hot Topic: Does energyefficiency lead to increasedenergy consumption?

NUMBER 7, JULY 2011lThe globalization paradox –Dani Rodrik l Unfair share –Thomas Pogge on affluentcountries’ responsibility forincreasing global poverty l Hot topic: Is nuclear powernecessary for a carbon-freefuture?

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‘Women hold up half the sky’ is a Chinese proverb affirming women’sequal contribution to the human experience but it is an aspirational,rather than a factual, claim. In developed and developing countriesalike, gender gaps persist in education, health, work, wages andpolitical participation.

For this issue of Making It, the theme is gender equality and theeconomic empowerment of women. As Kofi Annan, former UNSecretary General, pointed out, “There is no tool for development moreeffective than the empowerment of women”.

Women work two-thirds of the world’s working hours but womenearn only 10% of the world’s income, and women own less than 1%

of the world’s property. Women lag far behind men in accessto land, credit, and decent jobs, even though a growing

body of research shows that enhancing women’seconomic options boosts national economies. As

the current UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon,has said, “When we empower women, weempower communities, nations, and theentire human family.”

The first UN Women annual report, 2010-11, states, “Where women have equalaccess to economic assets, decent livelihoodsand leadership opportunities – the buildingblocks of economic empowerment –

economic well-being increases.”We are delighted to have a keynote article

on the challenge of empowering women byMichelle Bachelet, the Executive Director of UN

Women. Making It thanks colleagues at UN Womenfor their help in putting this issue together.

Editorial

Editor: Charles Arthureditor@makingitmagazine.netEditorial committee: Ralf Bredel,Tillmann Günther, Sarwar Hobohm,Kazuki Kitaoka, Wilfried Lütkenhorst(chair), Cormac O’Reilly and Jo Roetzer-SweetlandWebsite and outreach: Lauren Brassawoutreach@makingitmagazine.netCover illustration: Maya ZankoulDesign: Smith+Bell, UK –www.smithplusbell.comThanks for assistance to Donna ColemanPrinted byGutenberg PressLtd, Malta –www.gutenberg.com.mton FSC certified paper To view this publication online and toparticipate in discussions aboutindustry for development, please visitwww.makingitmagazine.netTo subscribe and receive future issuesof Making It, please send an emailwith your name and address tosubscriptions@makingitmagazine.netMaking It: Industry for Developmentis published by the United NationsIndustrial Development Organization(UNIDO),Vienna International Centre, P.O. Box 300, 1400 Vienna, AustriaTelephone: (+43-1) 26026-0, Fax: (+43-1) 26926-69E-mail: unido@unido.orgCopyright © 2011 The UnitedNations Industrial DevelopmentOrganization No part of this publication can beused or reproduced without priorpermission from the editorISSN 2076-8508

GLOBAL FORUM6 Letters8 The future of corporations – Paul Polak oncreating vibrant new markets, serving customersliving on less than two US dollars a day10 Hot Topic: Growth: the end of the world as weknow it? Richard Heinberg and MatthewLockwood debate the ‘end of growth’ or the ‘startof green growth’

14 Business matters – news and trends

FEATURES16 Empowering women entrepreneurs, at homeand abroad – Jan O’Sullivan sees gender equality as fundamental to Ireland’s overseas development programme18 Engineering eco-friendly solutions –Carolina Guerra turnshazardous waste intouseful products and wonthe 2011 Cartier Women’sInitiative Award for LatinAmerica20 Promoting sustainable lives and livelihoods –Omar Traboulsi on the challenges faced by ruralwomen’s cooperatives in the Republic ofLebanon and their crucial role

KEYNOTE FEATURE22 Closing the gender gaps – MichelleBachelet, Executive Director of UN Women,on how policymaking can advance the aimof gender equality, and how the barriers thatprevent women from seizing economicopportunities can be overcome

MakingItIndustryforDevelopment

The designations employed and thepresentation of the material in this magazinedo not imply the expression of any opinionwhatsoever on the part of the Secretariat of theUnited Nations Industrial DevelopmentOrganization (UNIDO) concerning the legalstatus of any country, territory, city or area or ofits authorities, or concerning the delimitationof its frontiers or boundaries, or its economicsystem or degree of development. Designationssuch as “developed”, “industrialized” and“developing” are intended for statisticalconvenience and do not necessarily express ajudgment about the stage reached by aparticular country or area in the developmentprocess. Mention of firm names or commercialproducts does not constitute an endorsementby UNIDO.The opinions, statistical data and estimatescontained in signed articles are theresponsibility of the author(s), including thosewho are UNIDO members of staff, and shouldnot be considered as reflecting the views orbearing the endorsement of UNIDO.This document has been produced withoutformal United Nations editing.

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Contents

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Number 8, 4th quarter 2011

30 Think bigger – Gayle Tzemach Lemmonsays women in poor countries need resources totap their entrepreneurial potential32 Coping with the crisis – Zoe Elena Hornexamines the impact of the global economic crisison women in the informal economy34 Country Feature – South Africa Interview withthe Minister of International Relations andCooperation, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane38 On the road again, with a new roadmap –European Commissioner for Environment, Janez Potočnik, on why environmentalists andindustry must work together

POLICY BRIEF40 Gender-sensitive industrial development 42 Measuring women’s economic empowerment44 Solutions to the gender pay gap

46Endpiece –Interview with Dr. Mustafa Hatipoğlu,managing director of a UNIDO project aiming tousher in a hydrogen economy

Cover illustrator Maya Zankoul is an illustrator/graphic designerfrom Lebanon and author of the comic blog-turned-book Amalgam.She currently works from her design office in Beirut on mobile andtablet app design, and illustrations for personal projects and formagazines. Her latest work includes an avatar-creating online app(The Zankoulizer), and an illustrated poster exhibition aboutLebanese cuisine and culinary traditions. Her next project is creatingan animated cartoon series from her drawings.http://pro.mayazankoul.com

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LETTERS

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BarefooteconomistsThank you so much for theinterview with Manfred Max-Neef (Making It, issue 7). He isquite correct that most peoplediscussing, measuring, ortackling poverty, never knowwhat poverty is. Beyond thephysical deprivations observedin poverty, lie the hope,creativity and courage neededto tackle it. The poorthemselves have to be involvedin designing interventionstrategies and successful plans.

Similarly, many vulnerableindividuals can find their wayout of poverty if empowered,especially through capacity-building and the availability ofenabling institutions,frameworks, policies,rewarding markets andproductivities. Years ofworking experience with thevulnerable groups inagriculture and the rural sectorhave revealed that productionand marketing constraints arewhat keep farming householdsin poverty. Tackling povertyrequires an in-depthunderstanding of theproblems and prospects inpeculiar settings, and lots ofinput from the poorthemselves.lTaiwo Osun, Kiel, Germany,website comment

Having Dani Rodrik andManfred Max-Neef in the same

issue (Making It, issue 7) isfunny. Professor Rodrikteaches at Harvard and must bea very clever man but I thinkthe ‘Barefoot Economist’ iscleverer still. Prof. Rodrikstates that countries thatsubsidize agriculturalproduction pay the cost, andthe countries that receive thosesubsidized agro-exports get thebenefit because food ischeaper. He obviously knowsnothing about the collapse ofHaitian agriculture as a resultof imported food surplusesfrom the United States. As theHaitian economist, CamilleChalmers – another ‘barefooteconomist’, who works closelywith peasant farmers’organizations – puts it: “Theconsequences aredisastrous…a hundredthousand people lose theirmeans of existence every year.”As for the food being cheaperin Haiti, well, we know what ishappening to internationalfood prices now!lM. Fleurimond, websitecomment

Worker-friendly?So, Bangladesh’s minister ofindustries says his governmentis “worker-friendly” (Making It,issue 7). Is this the sameBangladesh denounced by theInternational Trade UnionCongress (ITUC)? In its reporton Bangladesh in 2010, theITUC writes, “Garmentworkers began protests in Aprilto demand a minimum wage ofBDT 5,000 a month (€46).

These protests continuedthroughout the year, andmany were met with violentrepression: six workers werekilled and many injured.Trade union leaders werearrested, tens of thousands ofgarment workers charged inconnection with the protests,and the government closedhundreds of NGOs.”

The report continues, “Oneunion leader estimated that5,000 garment workers hadbeen fired because of theiralleged involvement inprotests. Although publiclysympathetic with the plight of

the garment workers, PMSheikh Hasina was convincedthat an “evil force” was behinda conspiracy to foment unrestin the industry. To address theunrest a special police force forthe garment industry wascreated.”l Farooq Javed, websitecomment

Beyond the grid“A revolution in electricity”(Making It, issue 6) is a greatarticle. I like it because it showsthat even those living beyondthe reach of the grid can enjoyaccess to energy and that it isgood business too! Who canargue with that? I wonder whygovernments are not doingmore to use biomass as an

The Global Forum section of Making It is a space for interaction anddiscussion, and we welcome reactions and responses from readers aboutany of the issues raised in the magazine. Letters for publication inMaking It should be marked ‘For publication’, and sent either by email to:editor@makingitmagazine.net or by post to: The Editor, Making It, Room D2142, UNIDO, PO Box 300, 1400 Wien, Austria. (Letters/emails may be edited for reasons of space).

GLOBAL FORUM

A revolution in electricity – HuskPower Systems uses rice husks tocreate gas that powers engines thatgenerate electricity.

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energy source. ‘Business asusual’ is going to ruin ourplanet. Does no one care aboutour children’s future?lChris Mann, websitecomment

Rural blightI was fascinated by theinterview with Vandana Shiva(Making It, issue 6). She is rightwhen she said that seeds havebeen “appropriated andcolonized” by corporations. Shetalked of the double hazard ofgenetic engineering and seedpatenting. Vandana shows howbad the attitude of the world’smajor companies andorganisations like the WorldBank towards farming indeveloping countries really is.

Agricultural output in theworld has grown but it has notbrought prosperity to most ofthe rural population (whichaccounts for over three billionpeople). It is in the countrysidethat people are most likely tostarve because globalagricultural markets are someof the most distorted in theworld. Only 22% of agriculturalexports flow from thedeveloping world to theadvanced. A handful ofcompanies monopolize thecommercial inputs intoagriculture. Vandana showedthis clearly with seeds and itapplies to fertilizer and thebuying of internationallytraded foodstuffs.

In many parts of the worldthe poorest peasants produce

most of the food they need tosurvive – but they have alsocome to depend increasinglyon non-farm work as well asmoney sent back by migrants tothe towns in their owncountries and abroad. Moreand more people will be drivenoff the land into non-farmwork or urban migration.l James Greaves, New YorkCity, by email

PraiseCongratulations on producinga substantial, readable andattractive journal! I just got acopy in the mail and was veryimpressed. May I add thatbefore coming to YaleUniversity in 2001, I was editorof the Far Eastern Economic

Review in Hong Kong, and havesome idea what it takes to bringout a magazine like yours.lNayan Chanda, Director ofPublications, Yale Centre forthe Study of Globalization, NewHaven, USA

I would like to thank you forsending Making It, issue 6,“Agribusiness: from farm tofork”. It was really useful forgetting to know someinteresting agricultureinitiatives around the world.We have circulated the reportto members of the FICCIAgriculture Committee.lDr S. Baskar Reddy,Agriculture Division, Federationof Indian Chambers ofCommerce and Industry(FICCI), New Delhi, India

For further discussion of theissues raised in Making It, pleasevisit the magazine website atwww.makingitmagazine.net andthe social networking Facebooksite. Readers are encouraged tosurf on over to these sites to joinin the online discussion anddebate about industry fordevelopment.

GLOBAL FORUM

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Three years ago, General Motors, thebiggest, most powerful corporation in theworld, was brought to its knees by failing toreact quickly and effectively to competitionfrom Japanese imports, which were smaller,more fuel-efficient, and cheaper.

Companies like Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola,and Microsoft, will soon face the same ‘do-or-die’ crossroads that General Motorsfaced if they don’t react quickly andeffectively to the challenge of earningattractive profits, at scale, from emergingmarkets.

Thirty million people shop at Wal-Martevery day, but there are three billion peoplein the world that will never set foot inside aWal-Mart store. They include 2.6 billionpotential customers who live on less thantwo dollars a day. Most of them live in ruralareas in developing countries and earntheir livelihoods from one or two acrefarms. Many more live in urban slums, andlive on what they can earn from informalenterprises, like small shops sellingconsumer items, or tailoring enterprises.

Coca-Cola sells what amounts to anaspirationally branded, fizzy, sugar-waterfor about 25 cents a bottle in villages all overIndia. In those same villages, 50% of thechildren are malnourished. What wouldhappen to Coca-Cola if a well-financedChinese company started selling anutritious soft drink at five US cents a

bottle in millions of villages around theworld? I believe Coca-Cola could quicklyfind itself in the same position that GeneralMotors faced three years ago.

The Gates Foundation has helpedmillions of people move out of poverty, andimproved the health and education ofmillions more. But, as far as I know,Microsoft, the parent company, does notmake a single product that sells to the 2.6 billion people in the world who live onless than two dollars a day.

However, the opportunities to createprofitable businesses serving three billionby-passed customers are almost limitless.For example, there are a billion people whowill never connect to electricity. That’sabout the same as the total population ofthe United States and Europe combined.There are another billion people who don’thave access to safe drinking water. Many ofthem get sick and some of them diebecause of it.

Why aren’t existing businessessuccessfully involved in emerging markets?There are three main reasons: lThey don’t see a profit in it. lThey don’t have a clue how to design theradically affordable products and servicesthat poor people need. lThey don’t know how to design andoperate profitable last-mile supply chains.

Three key practical strategies need to be

incorporated by businesses serving ‘two USdollars a day’ customers: lSmall margins at large volumes equalattractive bottom-line profits.Supermarkets used this formula to replace‘mom-and-pop’ grocery stores, and Wal-Mart improved on it. For emergingmarkets, it is really the Wal-Mart strategymultiplied one hundred times. lDesign for radical affordability. Amovement called ‘Design for the other 90%’is gaining a lot of momentum. It’s aboutlearning to design things that are affordablefor people who live on less than US$2 perday, and that also are income- generating. l Implement profitable last-mile supplychains.

Spring Health, the company I’ve startedwith my partners in India will, if successful,create a model platform for profitable last-mile supply chains to small rural villages inIndia. The mission of Spring Health is tosell safe drinking water at scale to peoplewho don’t have access to it now.

There are some 300 million people ineastern India alone that don’t have access tosafe drinking water. Most of them live insmall villages with 100 to 300 families, andthose villages have little in the way ofmarkets. But every one of these smallvillages has three or more ‘mom-and-pop’shops. They sell everything from cigarettesto soap, to candy, to cookies, and all kinds ofconsumable household items. What SpringHealth has done is to build a 3,000-litrecement water tank, for about US$100,beside each shop, and then purify the waterin it using a radically affordable waterpurifier liquid. The shopkeeper sells thepurified water for less than half a cent a litreto people in the village. Our customers –most of whom live on less than US$2 a day –report that they are experiencing a majordrop in illnesses and in medical bills. Eachfamily estimates that they pay betweenUS$25 and US$250 a year for medicines tostop diarrhoea, for visits to clinics and

The future ofcorporations

Paul Polak believes that, in the future, corporationswill only remain competitive in the global marketplaceby creating vibrant new markets – serving customersliving on less than two US dollars a day – at scale.

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doctors, for electrolyte replacements,intravenous infusions, and hospital stays,all to treat the illnesses that they get fromdrinking bad water.

The mission of Spring Health is toprovide safe drinking water to five millionpeople through 10,000 village shops withinthree years, and to provide safe drinkingwater to more than 100 million peoplethrough shops in 400,000 villages aroundthe world within ten years.

I believe there are thousands ofopportunities for creating new markets andcreating new companies to serve the threebillion customers in the world who arebypassed by current markets. It will takenothing less than a revolution in howbusinesses design, price, market, and delivertheir products and services to accomplishthis. But the outcome of this revolution willbe to create millions of new jobs, help morethan a billion people move out of poverty,and take a giant step toward endingenvironmental imbalance on the planet.

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PAUL POLAK – founder of Colorado-basednon-profit International DevelopmentEnterprises (IDE) – is dedicated todeveloping practical solutions that attackpoverty at its roots. For the past 25 years,Polak has worked with thousands offarmers in countries around the world –including Bangladesh, India, Cambodia,Ethiopia, Myanmar, Nepal, Vietnam,Zambia and Zimbabwe – to help designand produce low-cost, income-generatingproducts that have already moved 17million people out of poverty.

Right: Paul Polak leadsa talk on affordabletechnology design fordeveloping countries atPopTech 2008.

The treadle pump is a human-powered irrigationdevice that sits on top of a well. Pumping isactivated by stepping up and down on treadleswhich drive pistons, creating cylinder suction thatdraws groundwater to the surface. Paul Polak’sInternational Development Enterprises (IDE)played an instrumental role in popularizingtreadle pump technology in Bangladesh in theearly 1980s through focused value chain andsocial marketing interventions. Eighty-fourmanufacturers now produce treadle pumps and1.4 million treadle pumps have been sold to smallplot Bangladeshi farmers since 1985. The UnitedNations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)and other organizations have since begun theirown treadle pump initiatives in other countries.

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Growth: the end of theworld as we know it?

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The end of growthRICHARD HEINBERG is Senior Fellow-in-Residence at the Post Carbon Institute. Heis the author of ten books, and is widelyregarded as one of the world’s mosteffective communicators of the urgentneed to transition away from fossil fuels.

You’ve heard them. Politicians,economists, executives, all saying the samething: “The economy is recovering”.Recovering to what? – to its normal state ofconstant growth.

They are wrong. Economic growth iseffectively over.

It started a couple of centuries ago. Therehad been economic expansion before, but

it was slow and cyclical. Empires rose andfell. But, with the Industrial Revolution,rapid growth became normal. Economiststell us that this was because of innovation,division of labour, and increased trade,but it was mostly as a result of cheapenergy. It takes energy to do things, andwith cheap coal and oil, suddenly, peoplecould do more than ever. First coal, thenoil, sped up trade by fuelling our prizedinventions – railroads, automobiles, andairplanes.

Economists assumed that growth couldgo on for ever. It was an absurd notion.Nobody stopped to think that all thisindustrial growth was happening on asmall planet, with only so much oil andsoil, and only so many forests and fish. Wewere growing on borrowed time. We allgot hooked on growth. Rising GDPfigures became our main measure ofsuccess. More, bigger, and faster, meantbetter.

The first warning sign came in the ‰

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The start of greengrowth MATTHEW LOCKWOOD is head ofClimate Change at the UK’s Institute ofDevelopment Studies, and was previouslyAssociate Director for Climate, Transportand Energy at the Institute for Public PolicyResearch.

Economic growth has a lot to recommendit. Growth brought mass prosperity toBritain in the 20th century. It provided theresources to build the health, education,and social security systems that we value somuch, and that have been so widely copiedaround the world.

At the same time, we know that werequire government action to tackle theexternality at the heart of climate change.Markets on their own will not deliver theemissions reductions we need – not untilthe point where low carbon technologiesbecome competitive with their fossil fuelalternatives.

So, if we could get all the benefits ofgrowth, without the environmentaldamage, wouldn’t that be ideal? And isn’t itclear that we need action by governmentsto deliver both parts of the green growthpackage?

The debate on green growth shows thatthings are not that simple.

The most fundamental criticism saysthat green growth is simply impossible: wecannot develop and invest in low carbontechnologies quickly enough to avertdangerous climate change and a worldwarming by 3°C or more. This argument is

1970s. A team of scientists programmeda computer with data about populationgrowth, rising consumption, and resourcedepletion. Their conclusion?: there arelimits to growth. Mainstream economistsattacked those findings, using nastyrhetorical tricks but, 40 years later, thesame conclusion holds. In fact, theeconomies of the world’s wealthy nationsstarted stagnating years ago. As resourcesbegan to run out, governments businessesand households went into hock, up to theireyeballs, gorging on easy credit. Thefinancial system created ever morecomplex securities and derivativesschemes to soak up all that debt, and makeperpetually rising, imaginary profits onimaginary assets.

But money and debt depend on naturalresources. Piling up debt, year after debt,doubling it, and doubling it again, meantpiling up claims on resources that wereshrinking even as we depleted them. It wasa pyramid scheme – the mother of allbubbles. And, in 2008, it burst.Governments and central banks tried tore-inflate the bubble with bailouts andstimulus packages funded by public debt,but there are practical limits to debt, andwe are hitting them. There are practicallimits to energy sources, and we are hittingthem. There are real limits to the planet’sability to absorb our waste and industrialaccidents, and we have hit those too.

We are being told that the economy isrecovering, but take away new debt that thegovernment has taken on since 2008 tostimulate the economy and there has beenno real economic growth. There is norecovery. It has all been done with moredebt.

We have already mortgaged ourgrandchildren’s future, but to keep theeconomy from relapsing, we will need to

borrow even more. The game is up. Wehave reached the end of economic growthas we have known it. They are lying to you.But they can’t help it. We are all addicted togrowth. We all want better jobs and higherreturns on investments. But we live on afinite planet. The end of growth is not thefault of any one politician or political party,but some people benefited from growthmore than others.

We can live without economic growth,but we will have to start doing a few thingsdifferently. We have to measure and aimfor improvements in life that don’t requireincreasing our consumption of fossil fuelsand other depleting resources, or piling onmore debt: freedom; being with the peoplewe love; good health and the time to enjoyit; a secure, happy community.

We have to work together to build localeconomies where we can live and prosperbut – and this is a big but – without fossilfuels and without borrowing from thefuture. The longer we put this off., theharder it will be.

Economic growth, it’s over. Let’s move on.l Excerpted from Richard Heinberg’s The End of Growth: Adapting to Our NewEconomic Reality.

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“Nobody stopped to think thatall this industrial growth washappening on a small planet,with only so much oil and soil,and only so many forests andfish. We were growing onborrowed time.”

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based on the failure to decouple growthfrom carbon emissions before the climateimperative became clear, and before manyclimate policies kicked in. However,although it is a very serious concern, it isnot a foregone conclusion.

Rather, what this analysis shows is thedifficulty of achieving growth that is greenenough. Growth that avoids dangerousclimate change will require atransformation of the economy, andespecially our investment in low carbonenergy infrastructure on anunprecedented scale and at anunprecedented speed. Of course, thisapplies to the global economy, butdeveloped countries, like the UK, shouldbe in the lead.

This takes us to perhaps the mostdifficult aspect of the green growthagendas: the politics. There are problemsat three levels. First, shaping green growthwill require more active intervention inthe economy, and that intervention has tobe intelligent and confident. This is anenormous challenge for the politicalculture that has long relied on laissez-faire.

A second political challenge is thatmaking growth green involves arestructuring in the economy, and like allrestructuring, involves winners and losers.There will be additional costs in the shortterm. This presents a big problem for anygovernment, especially as public attitudesto environmental taxes are so hostile,especially in areas like driving and flying.

The third problem relates to debt. Thereis a powerful logic to borrowing from thefuture to finance the investments we needto make today to decarbonise theeconomy. Certainly, this will leave a largerlegacy of debt for future generations but, ifwe fail to do it, we will leave a much moredevastating legacy of environmentaldamage, and in the future, because of theirreversibility of climate change effects. Itwill not be so easy for people to buy theirway out of the environmental problems.At the same time, it also looks increasinglyas if we will need some form of fiscalstimulus to restore growth in the shortterm, and the best way to do this would beto spend on infrastructure. However,many governments, like the currentBritish one, have woven a powerfulnarrative of ruinous debt around theireconomic policy options, which makes itmore difficult for them to move quicklyand easily to do this.

Green growth, then, is far frominevitable or simple. Achieving it will bean unprecedented technological andpolitical challenge. We’d best get startedright away. n

“Growth that avoidsdangerous climate changewill require investment in lowcarbon energy infrastructureon an unprecedented scaleand at an unprecedentedspeed.”

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nEconomic growth is losingmomentum in most emergingmarkets, and few countries willbe able to grow at anythingapproaching trend rates ifeconomic activity slowsprecipitously in the West. Byregion, Asia remains in the bestshape overall. Recent data pointto a broad slowdown brought onin part by anti-inflationarypolicy, but Japan's post-tsunamirebound is helping to cushionthe impact of global weakness.Although there is now a real

to reinforce the region'straditional two-speed growthpattern, with South Americaneconomies performing betterthan elsewhere.

The recovery in easternEurope is slackening. Althoughexports and industrial output arestill growing, regional currenciesand stock markets have sufferedsharp falls. The spectre ofcontagion from the sovereigndebt crisis in the euro zone,which is also eastern Europe'skey export market, continues toloom large. Regional growth willslip to 3.3% in 2012. Russiangrowth prospects will continueto depend on world commodityprices.

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danger that Asian economies willexperience more than a benignslowdown, a return to recessionremains unlikely. Unlike in theWest, most countries couldrespond to such a scenario byintroducing further fiscal andmonetary stimulus. ChineseGDP growth will slow to a still-impressive 8.2% in 2012,assuming that the authoritiesstave off inflationary spirals or aproperty crash.

Latin America enjoyed astrong rebound in 2010, but

growth will slow to 3.7% in 2011owing in part to efforts to wardoff high inflation. Growth willmoderate further next year, to3.5%, although some countriesmay be able to cushion theimpact of weak external demandby a degree of policy loosening.Economic expansion shouldpick up in 2013-16, thanks torising domestic consumption,sound macroeconomic policiesand Asian demand forcommodities. However, highcommodity prices will continue

lActively shape their businessenvironments.

According to the WorldEconomic Forum and theBoston Consulting Group, themindset, practices, and businessmodels of these ‘NewSustainability Champions’ offercritical insights for emergingmarket-based businesses,established multinationals, andgovernments. They couldprovide multiplier effects andcreate the basis for replicationand extension among companiesoperating in emerging markets.They also serve as a startingpoint for redefining the future ofgrowth: one that is robust andefficiently binds together allelements of sustainability -economic, environmental andsocial.

The World Economic Forum andthe Boston Consulting Grouphave issued a new reporthighlighting the innovativebusiness practices of 16‘sustainability champions’ inemerging markets.

The companies were chosenfor creating unconventional,profitable solutions thatpositively impact economicgrowth and enhance overallsustainability in their regions.

The researchers deliberatelydid not look to governments,environmental organizations ormultinational corporations fromadvanced economies – all sourcesof well- practiced but as yetinsufficient answers. Instead,they went to agents who dealwith a wide range of constraintsin their daily business: rapidlygrowing companies originatingand operating in the emergingmarkets, where economicprosperity and populations aregrowing fastest, and whereenvironmental constraints andstresses are often highest.

As a result of a rigorous

New sustainability champions research process, the reportidentified and assessed 16emerging market-basedcompanies that share a uniquemindset and set of best practices.These ‘New SustainabilityChampions’, based in countriessuch as Brazil, Costa Rica, Egyptand Kenya, provide inspiringexamples for any corporationaround the world interested intackling the challenges ofperformance, innovation, growthand sustainability.

Specifically, these companies:lProactively turn constraintsinto opportunities throughinnovation.lEmbed sustainability in theircompany culture.

lBroad Group – People’s Republic of China lEquity Bank –Kenya lFlorida Ice & Farm – Costa Rica lGrupo Balbo – Brazil l Jain Irrigation Systems – India lManila Water Company – ThePhilippines lMasisa – Chile lTR Corporation – China, HongKong SAR lNatura – Brazil lNew Britain Palm Oil – Papua NewGuinea lSekem – Egypt lShree Cement – India lSuntech –People’s Republic of China lSuzlon – India lWoolworths – SouthAfrica lZhangzidao Fishery Group – People’s Republic of China

The ‘New Sustainability Champions’ are:

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Political upheaval and civilunrest have underminedeconomic growth across broadswathes of the Middle East andNorth Africa. However, the regionis set to stage a recovery next year.Despite the worrying outlook forthe developed world andsomewhat weaker global oil prices,faster regional growth will bedriven by massive publicinvestment in Saudi Arabia, robustgrowth in Iraq and – assumingthat major political turmoilsubsides – a rebound in countriesaffected by the Arab Spring.Elsewhere, economic growth insub-Saharan Africa will accelerateto 5% in 2012. Structuralconstraints remain serious, but

regional economies will drawstrength from high commodityprices, rising external inflows,fiscal spending and sporadiceconomic reforms. (EconomistIntelligence Unit)

nA new report byPricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC)looks at the threats to andopportunities for achievingexcellence in manufacturingproduction and supply.

“Events such as the Japanearthquake have highlighted theimportance of supply chainresilience. We live in a world wherethe connections up and down thesupply chain, as well as insidecompanies and outside to the

world around them, areincreasingly important.” In thiscontext, the report, Achievingexcellence in production and supply,highlights five issues that PWCbelieves will play an important partin determining the differencebetween manufacturing excellence,adequacy or mediocrity:l Identifying and preventingsupply chain risk.lLinking demand planning withthe whole value chain.lMaking customer and suppliercollaboration real.lAddressing lifecycleopportunities and demonstratingsustainable value.lAttracting the people and skillsneeded for the future.

The report concludes,“Common to all five is theimportance of companiesengaging and connecting betterwith customers, suppliers and theworld around them. Companiesthat are disconnected or fail toengage appropriately will missopportunities to achieveexcellence or, worse, face thedanger of ticking time bombs thatcould fatally disrupt productionand supply. Those that aresuccessful in making theconnections have the opportunityto gain ground and move ahead oftheir peers in distinctive andtangible ways.”(pwc.com/industrialmanufacturing)

The Global Green GrowthForum (3GF) held inCopenhagen, Denmark, inOctober, advanced ambitiouspublic-private partnerships,focusing on energy, transport,trade, and finance – key elementsof a green industrial revolution

The 3GF was attended by UNSecretary-General Ban Ki-Moon,OECD Secretary-General AngelGurría, Prime Minister ofEthiopia, Meles Zenawi, PrimeMinister of Kenya, Raila Odinga,12 ministers and deputyministers, five leaders of UNorganizations, 50 globalcorporate leaders,representatives of leading civilsociety organizations and greengrowth experts. The 200participants came from 27countries across five continents.

In his keynote speech, UNSecretary-General, Ban Ki-moon,stressed the importance ofpublic-private collaboration,“The green growth agenda canhelp drive the advancement ofsustainable development for thetwenty-first century. It is good

business – good politics – andgood for society.”

Director-General of theUnited Nations IndustrialDevelopment Organization(UNIDO), Kandeh K. Yumkella,who also took part in the 3GF,said, “For our future to besustainable and economicallyviable, we have to ensure thatour industry does not harm theenvironment and will not leadto global climate change. Thisis what Green Industry is allabout. UNIDO is helpingdeveloping countries secureresource-efficient low-carbongrowth, and create new greenjobs, while at the same timeprotecting the environment.We also help developingcountries move to cleantechnologies and implementenvironmental agreements,including the MontrealProtocol.”

Global Green Growth Forum

Prime Minister of Denmark, Helle Thorning-Schmidt addressing the openingof the 3GF: “We have heard the green words before. The task now is totranslate green words into green action. We need to work with our industriesand businesses to find smart solutions, develop intelligent regulatoryframeworks, and set priorities in research and development.”

MakingIt16

We believe that gender equality is a humanright. We also believe that equitable societiescan build stronger and more sustainableeconomies, which are better positioned toengage in international trade.

Increased trade, regionally and globally, iscentral to sustained economic growth for theworld’s Least Developed Countries. But it cannotbe gender-blind. The ability of a country to ben-efit from more liberalized trade depends on thestrength and productivity of its domestic econ-omy, which must include women’s economicempowerment. Supporting economic activityfocused on poverty reduction by empoweringentrepreneurs in Africa – men and women – istherefore an essential part of my work as Ire-land’s Minister for Trade and Development.

A number of important factors often limitthe capacity of women in developing countriesfrom taking advantage of economic opportuni-ties, including those generated through in-creased trade. Limited access to and control ofproductive assets, such as land and credit, is akey constraint for many women trying to es-tablish or develop their own businesses. If awoman doesn’t own her own land, it is difficultfor her to secure credit.

Women’s engagement in the economy in thedeveloping world is often confined to the in-formal economy. On the margins of the econ-omy, women are significantly over-representedin the more vulnerable areas of employment,such as unpaid family work, casual agriculturallabour and as domestic servants. The burdenof unpaid care work in the home is anotherlimiting factor which can affect women’s capac-ity to engage in commercial activity outside thehome.

However, it is also important to reflect onbroader issues of rights and empowerment.For example, educating girls is undoubtedlyone of the most powerful tools for women’sempowerment. Education provides womenwith the knowledge, skills and self-confidencethey need to seek out economic opportunities.Women’s role in decision-making is also a crit-ical issue. This goes right from women’s voicesat community and local level, to increased rep-resentation in business and farmers associa-tions, to increasing the numbers of women inparliament. Access to quality maternal and re-productive health, enabling women to controltheir fertility, is yet another key facet of em-powerment.

The Irish experienceLooking back at our own experience, Irelandhas some lessons to share on gender equalityand women’s economic empowerment.

Jan O’Sullivan TD, Ireland’s Minister of State for Tradeand Development sees gender equality as fundamentalto Ireland’s overseas development programme

JAN O’SULLIVAN was elected a member of the Irish parliament in 1998,and was appointed Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairswith special responsibility for Trade and Development in March 2011.

Empoweringwomen

entrepreneurs:athome

and abroad

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Much has changed for women in Irelandover the last 50 years. The women’s rightsmovement became increasingly active duringthe 1960s when women began to demandgreater equality. Free secondary educationopened up vast new opportunities. From the1970s onwards, large numbers of women beganto attend universities and other third-level in-stitutions. The workplace began to change.Women no longer had to give up their jobs inthe civil service when they got married. Leg-islative reform was introduced on equal pay,employment and social welfare. In 1985, after along campaign by the women’s movement, theHealth (Family Planning) (Amendment) Act waspassed, legalizing the sale of contraceptives toanyone over 18.

Yet, despite nearly half a century of changeand despite significant increases in the numberof women in the workforce, Ireland, incommon with many other developed countries,still has too few female entrepreneurs. Only 15-18% of established entrepreneurs in Ireland arewomen. Women are much more inclined tostart business in the consumer sectors, withmuch smaller numbers entering the businessservices and manufacturing sectors. Surveysdemonstrate significantly different attitudesamongst men and women to becoming entre-preneurs and growing their businesses. Moremen than women are confident that they havethe necessary skills and knowledge to start abusiness – 57% of men compared to 42% ofwomen – and this despite the fact that womenearly-stage entrepreneurs have higher educa-tion levels than men. Fear of failure amongstearly stage entrepreneurs is higher amongstwomen than men – 43% versus 34%.

Female entrepreneursSo, what are the key challenges for female en-trepreneurs in Ireland, and why are more ofthese entrepreneurs not engaged in exportmarkets?

Clearly the choice of sector is one issue,but there also continue to be important cul-tural and gender issues limiting women’s op-portunities. The three most common causesof failure of female-owned businesses arecited as lack of proper financing, lack ofproper experience, and lack of training. Thesefactors also contribute to the failure of male-owned business. But if we dig a little deeper,there are other more entrenched genderissues which have an impact. Studies haveshown that women are less likely to perceivethemselves as entrepreneurs, and avoid train-ing and courses targeted at ‘entrepreneurs’.The impact of family life and child care, as

well as a lack of high profile role models areother limiting factors.

Supporting women as entrepreneurs is akey objective of Ireland’s National Women’sStrategy (2007-2016). A programme of positiveaction on female entrepreneurship fosters net-working and training opportunities. One ini-tiative targets women entrepreneurs who havethe capacity to grow their businesses. Fortysuch women are selected each year to take partin a programme of mentoring provided on apro-bono basis by some of Ireland’s most suc-cessful women entrepreneurs.

The strategy also commits to improvingaccess to child care as well as providing moreflexible working arrangements and increasedparental leave. In 2010, the Government intro-duced the Early Childhood Care and Educa-tion Programme which provides improvedaccess to free pre-school education for childrenbetween three and five years of age.

Irish aidMany of these experiences and lessons learnedare reflected in Ireland’s overseas aid pro-grammes. As Ireland’s own progress on genderequality has demonstrated, equitable access toquality health and education is the bedrock onwhich women’s economic and political em-powerment is built. For example in 2010, IrishAid contributed €25.5 m. to the education sec-tors in Zambia, Lesotho, Uganda and Mozam-bique. The gender parity in all of thesecountries, including at secondary level has im-proved significantly in recent years. In Lesothoand Ethiopia, Ireland has worked with PlannedParenthood Associations to provide greateraccess to reproductive health programmes.

We have supported reform of nationalpolicy and legislation, such as the introductionof new legislation on inheritance rights andland reform in countries such as Uganda andSierra Leone.

Civil society organizations working ongender equality and women’s empowermentare key partners in our work. One civil societypartner providing micro-credit to womenclients in Timor Leste reports that improving

household incomes through participation intrading has enabled women to enhance theirstatus within the family and communities, andinfluence key decisions such as on their chil-dren’s education.

Fair TradeNetworking, alliance-building and capacity de-velopment are other components of our workin this area. Irish Aid has supported Fair Tradeorganizations in Central America and EastAfrica for a number of years now. During 2010,support was provided for the establishment ofa local chapter of the “Women in Coffee Al-liance” in Kenya , one of a very small number oforganizations dedicated to improving the con-ditions of women in the coffee sector by pro-viding information and capacity development.Evidence from fair trade programmes acrossthe developing world suggests that this type ofsupport is essential, as the Fair Trade focus ongrowing and trading export crops can oftensideline women. Support for the InternationalLabour Organization’s Women’s Entrepre-neurship Development and Gender Equalityprogramme resulted in more than 230 womenin Tanzania strengthening their skills andthereby increasing their market access, includ-ing by participating in exhibitions and tradefairs inside and outside the country.

It is clear, therefore, that although the dy-namics, pace, and direction of change will varyacross countries and cultures, there are some in-sights from Ireland’s experiences which can beshared with our partners. First of all, equal accessto quality education, as well as maternal and re-productive health, are the foundations of equal-ity and empowerment. Legislative and policyreform is critical. Undoubtedly, external influ-ences such as Ireland’s accession to the Euro-pean Union were key junctures in the processof legislative and policy reform, which began inthe 1970s. The women’s movement drove changein Ireland from the bottom up, just as thewomen’s movement in many the developingcountries is a key driver of change and will con-tinue to receive Irish Aid support. Women needrole models and support networks to demon-strate what is possible. Finally, women’s tradi-tional “caring” roles, inequality in the sharing ofthese roles between men and women, as well asour perceptions of what are appropriate rolesfor women and men both in the home and inthe economy, continue to be key constraints towomen’s economic empowerment. Progress onthese issues can make a real difference to en-suring equality and empowerment for womenin all countries and ultimately to building sus-tainable economies. n

‘Equitable access toquality health andeducation is the bedrockon which women’seconomic and politicalempowerment is built’

MakingIt18

The Cartier Women’s Initiative Awardsare an international business plancompetition created in 2006 by Cartier,the Women’s Forum, McKinsey &Company and INSEAD business school.The Awards aim to encourage the mostvulnerable category of entrepreneurs intheir most vulnerable phase: womenentrepreneurs starting up.

Each year, from over 1,000entrants, a jury selects 18 finalists – thetop three projects from six regions(Latin America, North America, Europe,sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East andNorth Africa, Asia-Pacific) – on the basisof their short business plans. Thefinalists are then invited to France forthe final round of competition, whichincludes presenting a detailed businessplan in front of the jury.

Based on the quality of the planand their ability to demonstrateexceptional creativity, financialsustainability, and social impact, oneLaureate from each of the six regions isselected. Each of the six Laureatesreceives the Cartier Women’s InitiativeAwards trophy, one year of personalizedcoaching, and US$20,000 of funding.

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Carolina Guerra set up her company, Ingere-cuperar, in the city of Cali in western Colom-bia, in 2007. As its name suggests – inge forengineering, recuperar for recovery – the com-pany engineers solutions to recover waste, butnot just any kind of waste, specifically the haz-ardous type. “First, we research the best wayto tackle the waste in question. Then we applythe process to re-use it, on an industrial scale,”says Guerra.

The idea for Ingerecuperar came fromGuerra’s former job at a company that gen-erated aluminium dross, the residual wastematerial that is produced from any processin which aluminium is melted. “Despite ourattempts to find a way to dispose of it all inan environmentally friendly manner,nobody in Colombia could provide one!Other firms have come up with solutions torecycle the metallic parts of the waste, butnot the rest of it.”

A good opportunity Guerra decided to join forces with two colleagues to research how to make use of thedross in its entirety. ‘The results were excel-lent! Given how much aluminium dross isgenerated in our region, we saw a good opportunity for a useful business.’

Guerra’s company managed to clinch theonly environmental licence in the country touse aluminium dross in recycling. The ini-tiative is an important step in the struggle todeal appropriately with hazardous waste inColombia.

As Guerra explains, “There is an extensivelegislation in Colombia against hazardouswaste, and little by little, industries that gener-ate waste are becoming aware of the impor-tance of complying with legislation and arehandling the hazardous waste in an appropri-ate way. Nevertheless, a high percentage of in-dustrial businesses are still unaware of thedamage that can be done in rivers and in thewider environment. And then there are other

companies that don’t comply with environ-mental legislation related to waste becausethey lack resources.”

Win-win alternative Guerra’s company offers a win-win alternative.“In our country, one solution for this kind ofwaste is to deliver it to hazardous waste dis-posal sites, which charge up to US$700 per tonto dispose of it. Some companies find less eth-ical solutions, others even give it away. But wepay for it as a valuable commodity!”

Securing the environmental licence to re-cycle the aluminium dross was no mean feat.“It took a great deal of patience to convince theauthorities,” says Guerra, “because this wassuch a novel solution here.”

Ingerecuperar now has 10 full-time em-ployees, and in 2010 it recycled 195 tons of alu-minium dross, a figure that doubled in thefirst half of 2011 alone. The company uses partsof the aluminium dross to produce a form ofcement which it uses to manufacture buildingblocks, benches, and fence posts.

With Colombia producing an estimated500,000 tons of hazardous waste each year,Guerra is embarking on other avenues of re-search and engineered solutions. These in-clude projects to recycle incinerator ash, foundfor example in furnaces that burn hospitalwaste, and ‘pipeline powder’- the dust that isextracted from industrial pipelines and is col-lected in filters. “It’s very dangerous,” saysGuerra, “because it’s full of heavy metals.”

Role of the authorities The control of hazardous waste in Colombiais the responsibility of two environmental au-thorities. As Guerra explains, “On the onehand, there is the Ministry of Environment,which is usually dedicated to issuing legisla-tion, and on the other, there are the RegionalAutonomous Corporations (CorporacionesAutónomas Regionales), which are supposedto enforce the legislation. However, the Cor-

porations complain about having neither theresources nor the personnel to monitor allthe companies, and therefore, many compa-nies fail to comply with legislation but are notpunished.”

Asked what she would like to change to im-prove the business environment, Guerra isclear. “I would request more support from thegovernment to small companies, like ours thatare just starting out and are helping the envi-ronment – reducing taxes and giving assis-tance. And I would like to see an improvementin the performance of the Corporations sothey could really force the hazardous waste-generating industries to deliver their wastes tocompanies like us.”

As for wider business awareness of the con-cept of green industry, Guerra says there ismuch to be done. “This concept of green in-dustry has barely entered the minds of mostentrepreneurs. It’s very difficult for small en-trepreneurs, who have to struggle for their sur-vival every day, to implement green actions intheir businesses. It is only the big companiesthat are taking on these issues.”

On being a businesswomanGuerra says she does not face much genderdiscrimination but does remember one inci-dent in particular. A supplier whose contracthadn’t been renewed called to convince In-gerecuperar to reinstate him, but he wasn’tmaking himself clear. “When I asked him toexplain, he lost his temper, and demanded totalk to the boss, saying he refused to justifyhimself to a secretary. Then, he threatened toget me fired for being rude and hung up!”

Regarding the situation of female entre-preneurs in Colombia in general, Guerra says,“It’s not very different to the situation of men.Doing business is very hard in our country formen and women. I have faced situations whena man doesn’t want to negotiate with me be-cause of the fact that I am a woman, but this isnot very usual.” n

Carolina Guerra is a pioneering eco-entrepreneur from Colombia whoturns hazardous waste into useful products. In October 2011, she won the

prestigious Cartier Women’s Initiative Award for Latin America.

Engineering eco-friendly solutions

MakingIt20

In Lebanon, grassroots agricultural producersare organizing within the framework of coop-eratives. The key to cooperative work is tocome together and pool resources – includingagricultural production equipment and otherinputs, but also knowledge and negotiatingskills – in order to get members a better deal.

There are currently around 1,350 registeredcooperatives in the country. In general, farm-ers’ cooperatives tend to be dominated by men,but agro-processing cooperatives tend to havea female membership. There are around 125rural women’s cooperatives involved in agro-processing, most of them located in the Beqaa,South, and North administrative regions. Theagro-processing that they are engaged in in-volves transforming raw agricultural produceinto desirable products for the market, in-cluding many popular foods. The cooperativeset-up helps the members to secure a place toproduce their wares, and obtain equipmentand raw materials, as well as helping them getinto local and other markets.

Challenges Both male-dominated cooperatives and ruralwomen’s cooperatives face significant difficul-ties in accessing local and international mar-kets. Key problems include decades of neglectof the agricultural sector of the economy, es-pecially the lack of enabling policies for in-vestment, particularly in the cooperativesector. The national budget allocation for theagricultural sector rarely exceeds 2%. Another

problem is the poor state of infrastructure, es-pecially roads and irrigation canals, which re-duces the chances of producing a good harvestand of getting crops to market while fresh.

A further issue is poor protection from risk.Agricultural workers and farmers typically lackaccess to safety nets, including insuranceagainst crop failures and social security. Likeeveryone in Lebanon, farmers and agriculturalproducers are working against a backdrop ofunrest – both political and economic. Conflictand economic downturns make it really hardto cope with damage to buildings, land and re-sources, interruptions in production, collapseof local markets, and so on.

Until very recently, the Ministry of Agricul-ture offered little support and accompanimentto rural cooperatives. At the widest level, politi-cal will is needed to challenge unfavourable na-tional, regional, and global policies which allowunregulated market access for foreign goods,creating unfair competition, thus undermininglocal produce. Closer to the ground, many ruralcooperatives face difficulties in meeting variouslegal and administrative requirements, as wellas in keeping up with participatory and inclu-sive internal governance processes.

Whilst the above mentioned obstacles mayseem to affect men and women equally, theyhave a more dramatic impact on women who,in addition, suffer from other gender-specificobstacles.

All these challenges pile up on top of eachother, making agriculture precarious, stressful,

and unrewarding. The result is a growing trendamongst male cooperative members to aban-don agriculture, at least as a main source ofincome, and to rely on non-farming activitiesand jobs. Women have fewer options as a rule,but where they can also find more profitableactivities, they too are voting with their feet.

What do cooperatives need to stop the rot?They are crying out for the right support andinvestment. Lebanon’s farmers and agro-processors need optimistic, energetic leader-ship from the government, recognition of thecrucial role they play in the country’s economiclife, and support to help the agricultural sectorgrow and prosper. But if this leadership is toenable Lebanon’s women cooperative mem-bers to play the fullest role they are capable of,it needs to understand the particular issueswhich shape women’s lives in agriculture.

Gendered differences In Lebanon, rural women have had to becomethe main contributors to agricultural produc-tion, from planting to marketing, due both toextensive male migration to urban areas andto increasing widowhood as a result of war.

The development of rural women’s cooper-atives is believed to have started in the mid-1990s, shortly after Lebanon’s 15-year-long civilwar ended. As international post-war recon-struction money poured in, a significantamount of aid was channelled to establishincome-generating structures for women.Some 50 rural women cooperatives were set up

Omar Traboulsi outlines the challengesfaced by rural women’s cooperatives inthe Republic of Lebanon and introducesan initiative that supports the crucial rolethey play in the country’s economic life.

OMAR TRABOULSI is the manager of the RegionalEconomic Empowerment for Women project, aninitiative of the Collective for Research and Trainingon Development-Action (CRTD-A), a non-governmental organization based in Beirut, TheRepublic of Lebanon. The CRTD-A seeks tocontribute to the social development of localcommunities and organizations through enhancingcapacities particularly in gender analysis, genderand development, poverty and exclusion. Theproject is funded by Oxfam Quebec and CIDA.

Promotingsustainable livesand livelihoods

Pictured: Rural women’sfood-processingcooperative in Rashayya,Beqaa governorate.

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and benefited from interventions that in-cluded the provision of hardware, as well astraining, mostly focusing on technical pro-duction and accounting.

However, such initiatives, although involv-ing high capital investment, were oblivious tosome critical factors determining success orfailure. By early 2000, it became obvious thatthe focus on women’s co-operatives was largelyill-planned and would be short-lived. Despiterural women’s traditional know-how and theimportance of their income in securing sus-tainable livelihoods, rural women’s coopera-tives face several problems.

Foremost among these is that even thoughthey produce good-quality products, resultingfrom expert skills and knowledge, marketaccess for rural women’s cooperatives remainsa huge problem.

One explanation for this is women’s lim-ited mobility. Women members of rural coop-eratives report that even though they are theproducers and provide all the labour in theirsmall agro-processing businesses, restrictivesocial norms are such that they are not able totravel on their own and use public transport.As a result, they are not able to explore mar-kets, meet and negotiate with clients and sup-pliers, or deliver and/or buy merchandise.

In addition, women need support to de-velop and acquire formal business skills. Ruralwomen have had less chance of receiving theeducation and training that would give themthe knowledge and technical skills they need to

compete on a level footing with commercialinterests. Despite some rural women alreadyhaving an amazing amount of natural abilityand formidable levels of skills, it is true to saythat women in the rural areas lack experienceof independently organizing and runningbusiness operations, of handling significantsums of money, of undertaking financialtransactions, and of establishing direct rela-tions with relevant public institutions. Thepredominance of, mostly male, “middlemen”further complicates women’s market access,enables men to cream off the profits fromwomen’s work, and reinforces the dominationof existing markets by men.

Further problems arise from the enormousworkload that women shoulder each daybefore they can turn to agricultural work. Ruralwomen’s unpaid, unaccounted, and invisiblecare work and care burden – which has tohappen somehow, come what may – results inexhaustion and a lack of sleep and leisure.

Engendering market accessIn 2002, the Collective for Research and Train-ing on Development-Action launched a na-tional intervention with rural women’scooperatives focusing on some 40 active coop-eratives distributed primarily in the Beqaaregion. The membership of these cooperativesincludes more than 600 women, most of whoare either heads of households or contributesignificantly to household income.

The initiative combines qualitative research,

direct support to women organizing in ruralwomen cooperatives, and policy dialogue withdecision-makers. Building on previous gaps, ef-forts were made to promote women’s knowledgeand leadership, as well as access to the public andpolitical sphere. The initiative assumes that atransformation is necessary in the gender rela-tions within households, so as to enable womento engage in fruitful economic activities and beactive in the public sphere. On-going researchseeks to identify the impact of rural women’s co-operatives in supporting the emergence of ruralwomen’s leadership as well as the new possibil-ities created for sustainable solidarity marketing.A key research focus is also the impact and im-portance of the added value of the work of ruralwomen’s cooperatives, namely the wise and ra-tional use of natural resources to promote sus-tainable lives and livelihoods.

Policy dialogue has been scaled up throughfull engagement with a national committee,newly established by the Ministry of Agricul-ture, with the aim of developing a nationalstrategy in support of cooperatives, one aspectof which is sustainable market access, espe-cially for rural women with a focus on their ra-tional use of natural resources.

The late Nobel Prize laureate, Dr. WangariMaathai, said, “You must not deal only with thesymptoms. You have to get to the root causes bypromoting environmental rehabilitation andempowering people to do things for them-selves. What is done for the people without in-volving them cannot be sustained.” n

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Womenattending apolitical rallyin Bangalore,India, March2007.

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Michelle Bachelet, Executive Director of UN Women, explains why the organization focuseson the economic empowerment of women, how macroeconomic policies and policymakingcan advance the aim of gender equality, and how the social and labour market obstacles thatprevent women from accessing greater economic opportunities can be overcome.

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GENDER GAPS

MakingIt24

“Only 13 of the world’s 500 largest corporations had a woman CEO in 2009”

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Livelihoods, most often earned through paid employ-ment or entrepreneurial activities, represent the mostimmediate and important indicator of empowermentand well-being. Like other development partners, UNWomen recognizes that efforts to reduce poverty aremost critically about empowering people economically,enabling them to earn sufficient livelihoods to lift themabove the poverty line.

Women’s experience of poverty is different from thatof men, owing to structural inequalities in societies andhouseholds that restrict their ability to earn and controlincome. Empowered economically, they exercise greatercontrol over their lives and can challenge the personaland social power relations that restrict their options andperpetuate their dependency. (The concept of empow-erment therefore involves agency, assets, opportunityand capacity, and is both a human rights issue and adevelopment issue.)

Making women’s economic empowerment a realityrequires bridging several gender gaps. Globally, the shareof women in paid employment outside the agriculturalsector has continued to lag behind that of men. In South-ern and Western Asia, and in Northern Africa, only 20%of those employed outside agriculture are women.Gender inequality in the labour market is also a concernin sub-Saharan Africa, where only one in three paid jobsoutside of agriculture are occupied by women. But evenwhen women represent a large share of waged workers,it does not mean that they have good jobs, or even securejobs. In fact, women are typically paid less and have lesssecure employment than men. For example:l The International Labour Organization (ILO) esti-mates that the gender gap in wages averages between 10and 30%. In Europe, the wage gap for 30 countriesranges from 15-25%, widening with level of educationand experience.lGlobally, more than half of working women (53%) arein vulnerable jobs, as own-account or contributing

family workers, where they earn little or nothing, andlack security and benefits; in parts of Asia and Africa,over 80% of working women are in this category.l At the other end of the spectrum, only 13 (3%) ofthe world’s 500 largest corporations had a womanCEO in 2009. In Europe, for which there is morecomparable data, the average share of women boardchairs at top corporations is also just 3%.lIn 2009, there were over 200 million women-ownedsmall and medium enterprises worldwide, almost30% of the total. In the United States alone, there wereover eight million women-owned businesses in 2010,employing over 23 million workers, and generatingUS$2.86 trillion. In the Asia-Pacific, some 35% of allsmall and medium enterprises are headed by women.Yet mainstream financial institutions have been slowto meet the needs of these entrepreneurs.lMany women, especially in rural areas, lack land orother forms of collateral needed to access capital. Yetthe Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reportsthat stark gender disparities in landholdings persistin all regions, not only in ownership but also in plotsize and quality. l Time use studies across 44 countries show thatwomen spend at least twice as much time as menon unpaid domestic work, and work longer hoursjuggling paid and unpaid work.

Closing these gender gaps is critical, not only forwomen but also for economies, societies, and evenfor business. There is increasing recognition thatcountries cannot grow and prosper without theequal rights and empowerment of women, one halfof their populations.

Indeed, while there is a moral and rights-basedargument for addressing gender inequality, at UNWomen I am determined to continue to buildcompelling evidence that gender equality is good foreconomic prosperity and social well-being. ‰

MICHELLE BACHELET is the first Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UNWomen, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women,which was established on July 2, 2010. From 2006 to 2010, she served as President of Chile.Her accomplishments as President included the 2008 reform of the pension system, whichintroduced a basic pension for poor homemakers who have never earned a wage outside thehome, as well as a stipend per child for all mothers. Another flagship programme of heradministration, which has been replicated in other countries in Latin America, was ChileCrece Contigo (Chile Grows with You), which provided support for parents and children fromconception through to the age of four. Other major gains for women under her governmentincluded the establishment of a large number of free day-care centres and nursery schools,which gave women more freedom to enter the labour market, and a law aimed at bridgingthe gender wage gap. A long-time champion of women’s rights, she has advocated forgender equality and women’s empowerment throughout her career.

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Much of this argument already exists. The World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Reportshows that, across 134 countries, greater gender equal-ity correlates positively with GNP per capita. Thismakes sense: the World Bank and others have shownthat women’s increased labour force participation andearnings generate greater economic growth and havea multiplier effect on society as a whole, particularly interms of education and health outcomes.

The FAO estimates that equalizing women’s accessto land and other agricultural inputs would boostagricultural productivity and reduce the number ofpeople living in hunger by 100m-150m.

In the private sector, a study by managementconsultants McKinsey & Co. found that companieswith three or more women on their boards or in topmanagement outperformed those with no womenby 53%.

How macroeconomic policies can advancegender equalityGovernments have a key role in redefining nationalgoals and developing macroeconomic frameworks tomeet these goals by facilitating a development strategycharacterized by more equitable and inclusive growth,and greater economic stability.

Governments need to focus on regulating themarkets – labour, credit, and goods and services – inways that provide decent work and equal opportuni-ties; and on making sure that macroeconomic policyand institutions, including the international financialarchitecture, aim to ensure that markets are expand-ing in a stable and sustainable way.

For this, governments need adequate fiscal policyspace, enabling them to relax balanced budgetrequirements and debt ceilings, and target publicinvestment in ways that avoid recession, keep peopleemployed, and sustain growth over the medium and

long term, thereby generating increased revenues topay off debt in future. And equally important, theyneed to actively use this space in ways that benefit allpeople, and especially those most vulnerable. Theimpact of the 2008-09 financial and economic crisis,and the responses of governments worldwide, illus-trated what I have said often in the past, that ‘the statecannot be neutral’.

Overcoming obstacles to women’s economicempowermentUN Women strategies to advance women’s economicempowerment rest on three pillars: a favourable legaland policy enabling environment; expanding accessto economic opportunities, including education andtraining, employment and entrepreneurship; andexpanding leadership and participation in the policydecisions that affect them.

Many economies are no longer able to generatesufficient jobs and livelihoods for the growingnumber of new people entering the labour force everyyear, making jobs hard to find for both women andmen, and especially for young people. Increasingly,those who have lost jobs or are just entering thelabour force have to pick up some kind of work in theinformal economy.

UN Women advocates for a more consistent andgender-equitable macroeconomic policy environ-ment, one focused on domestic growth with highemployment rather than low inflation, targeted publicinvestment rather than cuts to public services andinfrastructure. Our aim is to mobilize coordinatedsupport across the UN system – to countries that areprioritizing women’s economic empowerment, help-ing them to put gender equality at the heart of thedecent work agenda, including social protection, andto adopt measures to increase women’s access to, andcontrol over, productive assets.

“In 2009, there were over 200million women-owned small andmedium businesses worldwide,almost a third of the total...”

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This requires recognizing and supportingwomen’s economic potential. Policymakers need torevisit the conventional model of men as primarybreadwinners and women as ‘secondary’ earners.With the decline of manufacturing in many devel-oped countries, particularly since the globaleconomic crisis, many men have lost the well-paidjobs that made this true. In the United States, forexample, women were primary or co-breadwinnersin two-thirds of households in 2010. Elsewhere,women in poor households are increasingly playingthis role by migrating for work; in 2009 theycomprised at least 50% of migrant worker flows fromAfrica and Latin America and up to 75 and 80% fromparts of South and Southeast Asia. And even wheremen’s incomes are still higher than women’s, as isstill the case in the vast majority of countries,women’s earnings are often the key to keeping house-holds above the poverty line.

The impact of the crisis on women’semploymentHowever, while, especially in industrialized countries,the impact of the crisis on women’s employment wasgenerally less than it was on men’s employment, inlarge part due to women’s concentration in publicsector jobs, the growth in employment that occurredduring the partial recovery in 2010 was lower forwomen than for men, especially in developing coun-tries. This trend is continuing, as public sector jobs arecut as part of the austerity policies governments areadopting – either as a condition of IMF loans or topacify the bond markets. And whether it is men orwomen who are losing paid employment, in all coun-tries it is still women who are taking on more unpaidcare work (health, child, or elder care), to make up forloss of public services as well as lower householdincome.

A gender equitable policy environment also callsfor increased provision of a social protection floor, asurged by the ILO’s Social Protection Advisory Group.This would guarantee basic income through socialtransfers in cash or kind, such as pensions, child bene-fits, employment guarantees and services for theunemployed and working poor, while providinguniversal access to affordable essential social services,such as health, education, transport and other serv-ices, including child care. Women in particular benefitfrom such measures, which do much to relieve theirburden of unpaid care work.

Social protection should be considered an invest-ment, and not a cost. It delivers significant futurepaybacks in terms of improved human developmentoutcomes and as a key instrument for unlockingwomen’s productive capacity. This would enable themto more fully participate in economic life, as workers,employers, consumers and citizens.

Other kinds of public investment that can promotegender equality include labour-saving technology andalternative energy sources for cooking and foodpreparation; improved water and sanitation facilitiesto reduce the time women spend collecting water,transportation improvements to reduce the timespent in accessing markets and public services. Thesehave the potential to reduce many hours of work tomere minutes, freeing women to engage in paidlabour or entrepreneurial opportunities, includingmarket trading and small businesses.

Monitoring the gender impact of public invest-ment and public expenditure of all kinds, through agender analysis of national and local budgets, hasempowered women in countries in all regions tofollow the money and to use the findings to advocatefor gender-responsive budgeting in all sectors of theeconomy, not just education and health. UN Womenis expanding its work in this area, empowering

“Women’s increased labour forceparticipation and earnings generategreater economic growth and have amultiplier effect on society as a whole”

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women to hold governments accountable forcommitments to gender equality in other sectors aswell, including agriculture and trade.

In the run up to Rio+20 next year, UN Women isprioritizing women’s economic empowermentthrough the promotion of gender-responsive greeneconomy strategies, and institutional and gover-nance frameworks, as well as national food securitystrategies that support women small-scale agricul-tural workers and other rural women. We willadvocate for strengthened linkages between socialand economic development and environmentalprotection for the benefit of gender equality andwomen’s empowerment.

Working with the private sector UN Women is collaborating with private sectorcompanies in building their capacity to better supportwomen’s economic empowerment throughput theirvalue chain. This includes providing support towomen in their capacity as farmers, producers, work-ers, vendors, and recyclers, among others. Supporttakes many forms, and ranges from capacity develop-ment, such as skills training, business support,information and knowledge sharing, to facilitatingwomen’s access to finance and networks and theestablishing of women-friendly markets.

The large number of women working as ownaccount workers calls for increased attention tostrengthening women’s economic literacy andawareness of the exigencies of the market, such asquality and standards, their access to markets, andthe support from local authorities and tradesupport organizations. Existing practices that haveproven successful should be scaled up and repli-cated. One of those is creating multi-servicefacilities for women entrepreneurs and businessowners to overcome the barriers they face.

In line with this, we are also strengthening our part-nership with the UN Global Compact to advanceprivate sector commitment to the Women’s Empower-ment Principles, encouraging businesses to reviewrecruitment and promotion policies to ensure equalopportunities and to proactively appoint women toboards of directors and top management positions, andto expand business procurement to include womenentrepreneurs and women-owned businesses.

In our role as conveners on gender equality, and inthe context of our mandate to coordinate the genderequality work of the UN system as a whole, UN Womenis focusing on building communities of practice forwomen’s economic empowerment, bringing experts,leaders, and women’s groups together to share knowl-edge and good practices, and promoting South-Southcollaboration.

We are also advocating with governments and thecorporate sector to support women’s participation andleadership in economic policymaking, making the casein each country that this benefits economies, busi-nesses, and communities at large.

In all of this, we need to guard against women beingexploited rather than empowered. We can do this bymaking a link between women’s economic empower-ment and women’s economic and social rights; andbetween economic policy and the obligations thatgovernments have to progressively realize economicand social rights. This makes it more likely that partic-ipation in markets really does empower women, andin particular, poor women.

In the four years that remain to 2015, the deadlinefor achieving the Millennium Development Goals, UNWomen is determined to work with UN and nationalpartners to put gender equality at the centre of nationaland global efforts to achieve these goals; a key part ofthese efforts will be our work to improve livelihoodsand well-being among women worldwide. n

Panellists share a jokeat the UN Womenevent: “Women’spolitical participation– making genderequality in politics areality”, New York,September 2011.

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Microfinance can be an important start on theentrepreneurial path, but all too often con-versations about women begin and end withthe micro. Today, when we think of “entre-preneurs”, we tend to think of men, and whenwe think of “microfinance,” we tend to thinkof women. It is time to move beyond themicro when it comes to women.

When I first started reporting on womenentrepreneurs in conflict and post-conflictzones in 2005, nearly everyone, from Interna-tional Monetary Fund officials in their officesto development workers in the field, told methe only women I would find would be “sell-ing cheese by the side of the road.” Women, Iwas told again and again, did not own thekind of growing businesses that created jobsand economic growth. This, it seemed, wasstrictly the purview of men.

Although the percentage of women in-volved in entrepreneurship is generally lowerthan that of men, there are however excep-tions. In Ghana, for example, there are 120female entrepreneurs for every 100 male en-trepreneurs.

Beyond the microEven in the poorest and most traditionalcountries, women own businesses that gowell beyond the micro. In Rwanda, I met a gasstation owner with several workers, and awoman selling fruits and vegetables – not on“the side of the road” but rather for export toBelgium twice a week. Her work created jobsfor eight people at the time, including herhusband, and supported her own and severalother adopted children. In Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, I met a textile entrepreneur,with a new factory near the old front lines,whose company selling bed and bath linensemployed 20 people, mostly women, whocould now afford to send their own childrento school.

In Afghanistan, a country famous forbeing among the toughest environments forwomen to thrive, I met a young woman whodared to turn down a well-paying job offerfilled with perks from an international aidorganization in order to start a business con-sultancy that she believed would create jobsfor herself and many others. “If I go and

work with an international agency, they willgive me a very high salary, but it is just forme and my family, it will not support otherpeople,” Kamila Sidiqi told me at the time,in 2005. “If I work to start my own company,I will train a lot of people, I will help a lot ofpeople.” Her story is told in The Dressmaker ofKhair Khana, a book I wrote that was pub-lished in 2011.

According to research conducted by Ernst& Young, women own 40 to 50% of businessesin the developing world, and data from theCentre for Women’s Business Research revealsthat in the United States women-owned firmshave an economic impact of US$2.8 trillionannually. These trends provide great poten-tial as the belief in the power of growing busi-nesses to help lift a community out of povertyis shared by women across borders and con-tinents. Women around the world are actively

building better communities, and though thecontexts are different, the challenges they facelook remarkably similar:

Similar challengesFirst, women face barriers in accessing capital.Globally, female entrepreneurs say that ob-taining finances is their greatest obstacle tostarting or growing a business. Discrimina-tory laws and traditions regarding propertyownership and inheritance practices exacer-bate difficulties women face in accessing col-lateral for loans. Inheritance often skips overwomen, and land remains in the hands – andnames – of men, leaving women without guar-antees acceptable to banks. Many women whoalready own businesses must thus use cashfrom their profits to sustain their enterprises,a limitation that hampers their ability toinvest and to take on larger contracts.

GAYLE TZEMACH LEMMON is a Fellow at theCouncil on Foreign Relations, and the author of TheDressmaker of Khair Khana. Since 2005, she hasreported on women entrepreneurs in conflict andpost-conflict zones, including Afghanistan, Rwanda,and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and now serves as acontributing editor-at-large for Newsweek/DailyBeast. You can find more of her work athttp://www.gaylelemmon.com/journalism

biggerThink

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon argues that womenin poor countries need resources to tap theirentrepreneurial potential and ease the path totaking small ventures and building them up.

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Second, women face limited access to di-versified markets. Social and cultural con-straints contribute to women’s reducedmobility, making it difficult for them to de-velop business networks beyond their localcommunities. Business networks and asso-ciations, when well run, can help to addressthis constraint, but funding is often spottyfor these. Additionally, reaching interna-tional buyers is expensive and time-con-suming. Women struggle to find newbusiness opportunities as their networksstrain to compete with more the expansivenetworks of male entrepreneurs.

Third, women often lack business man-agement and technical skills, a disadvantagethat is a result of broader gender disparitiesin access to quality education. For example,women account for roughly two-thirds of theworld’s 793 million illiterate adults, and inspite of an increase in the ratio of girls en-rolled in primary and secondary school,higher enrollment rates have not translatedinto equal gains for women’s economic em-powerment and participation. Business edu-cation programmes for women areimportant because, as the InternationalCentre for Research on Women has found,

they “go far beyond technical skills building.”By providing women with the opportunityto expand their businesses, training also in-creases overall economic productivity andsocial investment, as women are more likelyto invest in education and health care forthemselves and their families.

Entrepreneurial potential Despite these numerous obstacles, thefemale entrepreneurs I met never gave up.Today, their tenacity should be matched byan investment in resources to tap their en-trepreneurial potential and ease the path totaking small ventures and building thembigger. Mentoring women starting busi-nesses and creating financial products tai-lored to their needs would benefit not justtheir families, but their economies. As USSecretary of State, Hillary Clinton, explainedin a March 2011 article for Bloomberg,women are an emerging market, and whenthey “have freedom to start businesses, theeconomic, political, and social benefits rippleout far beyond their own home.” By ignor-ing half of the entrepreneurial talent pool,countries across the globe cap their eco-nomic potential.

Organizations like Mercy Corps, GoldmanSachs 10,000 Women, Bpeace, and Peace Div-idend Trust, among others, have focused theirattention on these businesswomen in nationslike El Salvador, Liberia, and Afghanistan,helping entrepreneurs to unearth market op-portunities and learn the skills their growingventures require. Their work should not bethe exception, but instead become the rule asthe world moves beyond the micro – anddreams bigger for women.

In the past decade, microfinance has wonconverts worldwide as the best way to liftwomen out of poverty. Stories of womenowning cows, selling flowers, and sewinghandicrafts have spread, while the recogni-tion of women’s importance as partners infighting poverty and creating a more stableworld has grown.

Yet, while microfinance is undoubtedlypart of the solution, we risk confusing it withthe entire solution when it comes to women.While focusing on the virtues of the small,we have largely ignored the medium, alongwith the contributions and the strugglesfacing women worldwide who are workingto turn start-ups into thriving large busi-nesses. n

Afghaniseamstress,Kabul.

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Perhaps the most enduring legacy of theglobal economic crisis is the intractable em-ployment crisis gripping the world’s work-force. Unemployment is at record highs inmany of the world’s richest countries, but it isunderemployment that threatens the world’spoorest and most vulnerable workers. Withlittle access to formal employment opportu-nities – before or after the crisis – mostincome earning opportunities for those in thedeveloping world are found in the informaleconomy. This employment is largely lowwage and high risk, with scant legal or socialprotection. A rise in underemployment sig-nals a rise in those working but not earningenough to escape poverty, and while anotherround of bailouts to the world’s richesteconomies seems imminent, the pressure atthe bottom of the global economic pyramidis growing.

Women tend to be dramatically over-rep-resented in the informal workforce. In India,for example, informal employment accountsfor nine out of every 10 women working out-side agriculture. And there is a significantoverlap between being a woman, working inthe informal economy, and being poor. Com-pared to their male counterparts, women aremore likely to be self-employed and sub-con-tracted workers, and less likely to be employ-ers or paid employees of informal enterprises.Many are also breadwinners or contributevery high proportions of the householdbudget, putting informally employed womenat the head of many of the world’s most eco-nomically and socially vulnerable households.

Good times and badThough few dispute its ranks are swelling, theinformal workforce has received little atten-tion throughout economic crisis discussions– either as a point of interest for investigationor intervention. It is commonly assumed thatthe informal economy is flexible enough toadapt to economic shocks while simultane-ously providing a refuge for retrenchedformal workers. This is simply not the case.In a global economy where formal and infor-mal economies are dynamically linked, infor-mal workers cannot be immune from theimpact of the crisis. Demand sensitivities,price fluctuations, and the dynamics of com-petition shape the informal economy in goodtimes and in bad.

In late 2008, the partners of the InclusiveCities project, with overall guidance and co-ordination by the global network, Women inInformal Employment: Globalizing and Or-ganizing (WIEGO), set out to address the gap

demand for recyclables. Wageworkers faceddecreased work orders for products bound foroverseas. Compounding the problem, infor-mal workers faced increased competition fromnew entrants to the workforce, and had nosocial or economic safety nets to fall back on.

Grim pictureA year later, respondents reported a similarlygrim picture – a few positive developments,but a general lag in recovery in wages andworking conditions. Persistent unemploy-ment and underemployment pushed moreworkers into informal employment, andmany respondents continued to work longerhours for less pay. While 77% of 2009 respon-dents reported that their incomes had fallenbetween early and mid-2009, 55% reportedthat their incomes had fallen further betweenmid-2009 and mid-2010. Some respondentsreported an increase, but none had seen theirincome return to pre-crisis levels and mostrising incomes had not kept pace with in-creased costs of living.

Vulnerability – the probability that a shockwill result in a decline in well-being – has in-creased for households dependent on incomefrom informal work, exposing women andchildren in particular. Strongly driven to con-tinue working for the well-being of their fam-ilies, women are struggling harder to feedthem, while still providing equal or greaterlevels of unpaid care and domestic chores.Many such working women commit the en-tirety of their incomes to household expendi-tures – an increasing burden as chronicunemployment and underemployment take atoll on other household earners. Despite de-voting more and more time to paid work,women were less likely to be able to afford thefew conveniences that could lighten theirunpaid load, like prepared meals and child-care.

Many respondents faced fewer resourcesthat were stretched even further as food andfuel prices have remained high since early2008. Restricting both the quantity and qual-ity of food, women were serving fewer meals,while “luxury” items like milk and meat wereeliminated from many households. School-related costs were also difficult to meet. Whilewithdrawals were uncommon in 2009, thestrain had taken its toll and drop-outs wereincreasing by 2010. Women were anxiousabout the impacts of these measures on theirchildren, highlighting the fact that the crisishas heightened the role of women as gate-keepers in the inter-generational transfer ofpoverty.

Zoe Elena Horn examinesthe impact of the globaleconomic crisis on women inthe informal economy.

in information about the impact of the crisison informal workers, particularly women. Re-searchers conducted individual and focusgroup interviews in 14 urban locales acrossAfrica, Asia and Latin America, and in threesegments of the informal economy: home-based work, street trade, and waste collection.

First-round evidence, from early 2009, sug-gested that participants were affected by thecrisis in much the same way as their formalcounterparts. Self-employed workers suffereddirectly and indirectly from shrinking con-sumption and declining demand in local mar-kets. Cash-strapped patrons forced streetvendors and home-based producers to lowerprices, in spite of rising work inputs. Wastepickers faced plummeting prices for their col-lected materials due to depressed global

COPINGWITHTHECRISIS

ZOE ELENA HORN coordinated the InclusiveCities study on the impacts of the global economiccrisis on informal workers, and is the author of NoCushion to Fall Back On: The Global EconomicCrisis and Informal Workers and Coping withCrisis: Lingering Recession, Rising Inflation, andthe Informal Workforce. Inclusive Cities is acollaboration of membership-based organizations(MBOs) of the working poor, international alliancesof MBOs, and support organizations committed toimproving the situation of the working poor.

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ResponseIt is essential that policymakers acknowledgethe informal economy as a critical source ofemployment during good times as well asbad. With an extended forecast of economicuncertainly, and more and more of the world’sworkforce turning to informal livelihoods, ex-tending social and economic protection forthese workers has never been more critical.Informal employment is still an enigma tomany policymakers, which makes consulta-tion with informal workers even more essen-tial in the development of any crisis-responsestrategy. In 2009 and 2010, respondents in theInclusive Cities study were asked to proposeand rank a variety of possible crisis interven-tions. Unsurprisingly, workers denouncedstopgap measures and prioritized greaterrecognition for their livelihood activities.

First and foremost, workers must be al-lowed to earn a living. Reducing the barriersto informal work – harassment, raids, barringaccess to waste – allows workers to continue tofeed their families during desperate times.Wage protection and inclusion in minimumwage schemes are also critical to protect work-ers’ incomes, and small workplace invest-ments – access to water and toilets at markets,safe waste-handling equipment, subsidizedelectricity for home-based workers – couldhave substantially magnified effects on earn-ings and well-being. Workers would also ben-efit greatly from programmes to improvefinancial literacy and access to financial serv-ices. With an eye to the future, respondentswere eager for skills training and upgrading,and improved access to and knowledge ofmarkets, such as inclusion in municipal wastecollection schemes. Finally, the greatest in-vestment should be made in the creation oftargeted social protection measures for infor-mal workers – such as specialized childcareand health services – to address the chronicinsecurities in food, health, and educationfaced by these workers.

Informally employed women will play aparticularly important role as agents ofchange. Women tend to be the least visible andmost vulnerable in the informal economy, andyet are often the most powerful economic andsocial agents in their households and com-munities – their mobilization and leadershipwill be critical to improving the lives of manyworkers and their families across the develop-ing world. For this reason, it is critical thatgreater gender-specific monitoring in the in-formal economy becomes a priority both forgovernments and for economic and interna-tional institutions in the future. n

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Johannesburg, is theprovincial capital ofGauteng, thewealthiest provincein South Africa, and isthe economic andfinancial capital ofsub-Saharan Africa.

Very much Africa's superpower, South Africahas the continent’s biggest economy. Since theend of apartheid and the first all-race electionsin 1994, the country has experienced robusteconomic growth. The global economicdownturn in 2009 triggered South Africa’s firstrecession in 17 years but, by the end of 2010,there was a broad-based upturn, drivenprimarily by renewed global demand forcommodities, spending related to the 2010World Cup, a revival in the automobileindustry, and increased demand for chemicalproducts.

Best known for its precious metals, fruit,and wine, in recent decades, South Africa’seconomy has undergone a transition from onedominated by mining and agriculture to onein which manufacturing and financial servicescontribute the larger share of Gross DomesticProduct (GDP).

South Africa manufactures a wide range ofconsumer goods, including foodstuffs, textilesand clothing, footwear, and metal, chemicaland paper products. However, this sectorcontracted when the ending of the protectivetrade regime applied during the apartheid era

left some consumer goods industries unableto compete in the global market. At the sametime, since 1994, the output of capital goods –objects that are used to produce other goodsand services – has increased. Metals andengineering, particularly steel-relatedproducts and the automotive industry, are keyelements of this sector. During the firstdecade of the 21st century, an infrastructure-driven construction boom created highdemand for related goods, such as electricalmachinery, iron and steel, non-ferrous metalproducts, metal products, and machinery.

Today, manufacturing contributes 15% ofGDP, and is a crucial employer and source ofexports. Some sub-sectors, such as textiles,will continue to suffer from competition fromcheap Asian suppliers, but the vital vehiclesegment, which is the country’s biggestmanufacturing industry, is poised for furthergrowth, thanks to new investment from keymultinationals.

The growth of the economy in recent yearshas enabled a measurable decline in incomepoverty. Notable development achievementsinclude an increase in net secondary school

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enrolment from 45% to 72% between 1991and 2008; the construction of 1.6 million freehousing units for low-income families since1994; an increase in access to electricity from34% in 1993 to 81% in 2007, with similarimprovements recorded for water andsanitation; and an expanded coverage of thesocial grant system, which primarilysupports children, from 2.5 millionbeneficiaries in 1999 to over 13 million in2009.

Despite these advances, South Africacontinues to grapple with extreme differencesin incomes and wealth. Inequality hasincreased, and the poor continue to havelimited access to economic opportunities andbasic services. Human developmentchallenges loom large. Life expectancy is just51 years, and South Africa has the largestnumber of people living with HIV/AIDS inthe world (over 5.5 million). Current healthproblems are rooted in the apartheid legacy,with the migrant labour system responsiblefor social changes that have led to thedestruction of family life, alcohol abuse, andviolence – particularly gender-based violence.

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The health delivery system remains heavilyskewed in favor of the elite.

One of the key challenges for the economyis the high level of unemployment. SouthAfrica has one of the world’s lowest labour-participation rates and one of its highestunemployment rates. According to a recentreport by the Organization for EconomicCooperation and Development (OECD), out ofthe 32 million working-age population, onlyabout 13 million people (40%) have jobs,compared with around 60-75% in othermiddle-income emerging markets. One inthree South Africans in the labour force,including half of young black people aged 15-24, is unemployed.

Recognizing the gravity of the situation,the authorities made job creation the toppriority in the 2010 and 2011 budgets. TheNew Growth Path (NGP) sets an ambitioustarget of creating five million more jobs inthe next decade, so as to reduce theunemployment rate by 10%. The NGPstrategy is based on enhanced investment infive key sectors, skills development,

improved public service delivery, andenhanced regional economic integration.Pravin Gordhan, the finance minister,recently estimated that it would requireeconomic growth of 6% a year for the next20-30 years to make significant inroads intothe ranks of the unemployed. As critics havepointed out, that level of sustained growthhas not been seen since the mid-1960s, andlooks unlikely to return now.

President Jacob Zuma has made outreach toemerging economies and alliances a priorityfor his presidency, and, in April 2011, SouthAfrica was formally inducted into the BRICgroup (henceforth, BRICS), alongsideeconomic giants, Brazil, Russia, India, andChina. South Africa is also according moreimportance to its membership of the IBSADialogue Forum, an international groupingfor promoting international cooperationbetween India, Brazil, and South Africa. IBSArepresents three important poles forgalvanizing South-South cooperation, andprovides the three countries with a platform toengage in discussions for cooperation in the

fields of agriculture, trade, culture, anddefence, among others.

Another significant challenge is climatechange and carbon emissions, especially giventhe country’s carbon-intensive economy.South Africa meets 77% of its power needswith coal, and has the highest carbonemissions per capita of any developingcountry – even though many people have noaccess to electricity. Work on a formal climatechange policy, based on renewables, energyefficiency, and low-carbon green industries, iscontinuing. Speaking at UNIDO’s ViennaEnergy Forum in June 2011, Dipuo Peters, theenergy minister, said that solar and wind arefine as energy sources for small energy needslike household lighting, but not for thebaseload power needed for heavy industry. Shesaid South Africa has large power needs andabundant reserves of coal, so will proceed withconstruction of two huge 4,500 MW coalpower plants. Responding to criticism of thecarbon emissions, Peters said the new coalplants would use carbon capture and storagetechnology. n

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You recently said that climate challengescannot be solved without empowering andeducating women. Can you explain why?Women in developing countries are highlydependent on local natural resources for theirlivelihood, because it is their responsibility tosecure water, food, and energy for cooking andheating for their families. The effects of cli-mate change, including drought, uncertainrainfall, and deforestation, make it harder tosecure these resources. Therefore, any effortsto address the threat posed by climate changewill be insufficient if they do not include em-powering and educating women.

Internationally, women are well-positionedto be agents of change through mitigationand adaptation activities in their households,workplaces, communities and governments.Global efforts to address the challenges of cli-mate change cannot afford to ignore them.Empowered and educated women can makewiser environment choices, especially whensecuring natural resources for their liveli-hoods. They can also select greener optionsfor heating, cooking and energy.

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Ahead of the UNFCCC climate changeconference that will take place in Durbanfrom November 28 to December 9, 2011,Making It spoke to South Africa’sInternational Relations and CooperationMinister, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane

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Women produce up to 80% of the food inthe developing world, as they do here inSouth Africa. Knowledge will assist women tofarm in a smarter way with seeds and prod-ucts which are better suited for the world’scurrent changing environment. Only whenwomen have equal access to training, infor-mation, credit and skills-development pro-grammes will they be able to fully participatein climate change initiatives.What are the climate change adaptationmeasures and actions that will help advancethe emancipation of Africa’s women? A global effort is required to ensure not onlysupport for women as they deal with disas-ters, but also to make meaningful interven-tions to address climate change. I believeadaptation and mitigation policies that fail toconsider gender equity will be inefficient, andwill increase poverty and food insecurity.

A coherent approach is required to addressthe particular challenges faced by women andtheir role in advancing sustainable develop-ment. Such an approach should include cli-mate change adaptation which responds andsuccessfully reduces the vulnerability of natu-ral and human systems to climate change ef-fects.

For Africa to adapt in a manner that cre-ates a climate conducive to the advancementof the emancipation of its women, the inter-national agreements reached on climatechange must, as a key element, have supportfor adaptation in all its forms, be it technol-ogy, capacity-building or finance. Africa isone of the most vulnerable continents be-cause of the range of projected impacts andthe low adaptive capacity of the region. Adap-tation must therefore be central to theDurban climate change conference(COP17/CMP7) outcome, with an urgent needfor immediate and adequate support formeasures and actions, including the provi-sion of substantial new and additional publicfinancial resources, environmentally soundtechnologies, and capacity-building in a reli-able and prompt manner.

Africa’s priorities are to implement cli-mate change programmes and projects to

attain development goals, including the Mil-lennium Development Goals. In this regard,it is important that developed countries andpartners provide full support for adaptationstrategies in Africa, in particular the imple-mentation of national adaptation pro-grammes of action prepared the leastdeveloped countries in Africa. As incomingpresident of COP17/ CMP7, one of my pri-mary objectives is to ensure the package ofagreements adopted in Durban will build onthis. In this regard, I am supported by theAfrican Union whose heads of state have al-ready prioritized adaptation in climatechange.What can be done to ensure that the financ-ing mechanisms for adaptation will be flexi-ble enough to reflect women's priorities andneeds? We know that climate change impacts andmitigation and adaptation responses affectwomen and men differently. Women aremore dependent on the natural resourcesmost threatened by climate change, but alsohave more restricted access to credit, tech-nology, and information.

A transitional committee made up of rep-resentatives from 25 developing and 15 devel-oped countries was commissioned to designthe Green Climate Fund. It was asked tosubmit its recommendations for approval atCOP17/CMP7 in Durban in November 2011.Women leaders in Durban should thereforescrutinize these recommendations to ensurethat it reflects the priorities and needs ofwomen. You have stated that the participation ofwomen in climate change initiatives must beensured. Given that women are currentlyunder-represented in the decision-makingprocess of environmental governance, howcan the role of women's groups and networksbe strengthened? Women are under-represented in the deci-sion-making process on environmental gov-ernance which is a major concern to me andother women leaders. I, along with manyother world leaders, believe women shouldbe equally represented in decision-making

structures to allow them to contribute theirunique and valuable perspectives and expert-ise on climate change.

As incoming COP17/CMP7 president, I callon all relevant stakeholders to facilitate andincrease the participation of women, partic-ularly at grass roots levels, as decision-makers. It is vital that, before implementingclimate change policies, governments, UnitedNations programmes, funds and agencies andother relevant bodies take the necessarymeasures to enable women to participatefully in all levels of decision-making relevantto climate change.

As part of the work we do to prepare forthe COP17/CMP7, the South African govern-ment will be engaging widely with the variouscommunities in South Africa, and womenshould be part of these dialogues. We want toencourage the women from every part ofSouth Africa to become part of the dialogueand share their ideas and concerns with us.

I will do everything in my power to ensurewomen have a strong voice in Durban.The BASIC group of countries (Brazil, SouthAfrica, India and China) are some of thefastest industrializing countries in the world,and, as such, have a pivotal role to play ad-dressing climate change challenges. How canthe BASIC group call on other countries tolimit their GHG emissions, while increasingtheir own? The BASIC group appeals for an inclusive,fair and effective climate change deal, whichis favourable to both developed and develop-ing countries. This group of developingeconomies calls for an agreement that recog-nizes the common responsibility of all coun-tries to commit to the reduction of emissions,including themselves, while not inhibitingthe development of developing countries.

South Africa is implementing nationallyappropriate mitigation actions, which willresult in the reduction of emissions by 34%by 2020, and by 42% by 2025. We are also inthe process of completing our White Paperon National Climate Change Response Policy,which will outline the country’s leadership inresponse to climate change. n

“Adaptation andmitigation policiesthat fail to considergender equity willbe inefficient.”

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During the 20th century, the world populationgrew by four times, and its economic outputby 40 times. We increased our fossil fuel useby 16 times, our fishing catches by 35 times, andour water use by nine times. It was called the“great acceleration” – which fits nicely with thisarticle’s motoring metaphor title.

One hundred years ago, when the worldpopulation was 1.5 billion, this growth pathwas fine. It gave us health, well-being, andwealth. But with a population of seven billion,it is not fine. Every day, 140,000 more peopleare sharing a planet which will stay the samesize. As we don’t have another planet, we haveno choice but to use the resources on this onemore efficiently.

Resource efficiency is not a choice, it is in-evitable. Our choice is whether to do it now, orwait until we are forced to do it, when criticalresources are exhausted and expensive. To goback to the motoring metaphor, if we want tocontinue to accelerate, we need to changeroads or we are going to start driving straightinto some walls.

Prices and costsSo, what should the new roadmap look like?Let’s look at what made us so competitive sofar, and see how that is changing.

Europe is poor in mineral resources. We get48% of our copper ore from abroad, 64% ofour zinc and bauxite, and 78% of our nickel.We import all of our cobalt, platinum, tita-nium, and vanadium. As a highly import-de-pendent continent, you would expect that wewould manage our resources efficiently. Thereason we don’t is because their prices have ac-tually been decreasing in real terms for the last150 years, excepting occasional wars and oilcrises.

At the same time, labour costs continued torise. To remain competitive, we had to use allour ingenuity to match these increased costswith massive increases in labour productivity– increasing it about 20 times in the same 150years. This mutually reinforcing increase incosts and productivity fuelled the engine ofour technological progress.

Ingenuity and innovationThe mega-trend today is the end of perpetu-ally cheaper resources. With material costsmaking up more than 40% of total costs inmanufacturing industries, compared to lessthan 20% for labour, it is clear that we need toapply the same ingenuity and innovation toimproving our resource productivity now, aswe did to improving our labour productivityin the past.

Onthe roadagain–withanewroadmapEuropean Commissioner forEnvironment, Janez Potočnik, on whyenvironmentalists and industry inEurope must work together to decouplegrowth from resource depletion.

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In a resource-constrained world, our re-source poverty means that the old cycle of ex-tract-use-throw away, extract-use-throw away,will only lead to further dependency on exter-nal sources and vulnerability to price hikes.

This is the message that leaps out at mefrom reading the background papers. It is themessage that leaps out from the industrialpolicy of Japan and Korea. It is the messagethat leaps out from the latest Chinese five-yearplan.

Locked-inOur challenge is that, after a few centuries ofresource-intensive growth, we are “locked-in”to resource-inefficient infrastructures, re-source-inefficient economic and financial sys-tems, resource-inefficient business models,and resource-inefficient behaviour. This is aproblem that is not faced by the BRICs, whichare able to quickly change direction in re-sponse to resource constraints. If we in Europeare to remain competitive in this new para-digm, we will have to achieve a major struc-tural transformation.

There will be no growth if it is not greengrowth. That is why environmentalists and in-dustry must move away from their oldpolemics and work in partnership. Environ-ment policy cannot just be about punishingpolluters. We must build it into the very waywe produce and consume.

If we are able to do this, we will start to seeenvironment policy not as a constraint oncompetitiveness, but rather as essential to en-suring our future competitiveness. Or to lookat it another way, we are not protecting the en-vironment from business, so much as usingbusiness to protect the environment.

ResourcefulnessI remain optimistic, because one resource thatwe have in plentiful supply in Europe is re-sourcefulness itself. The power of our ideasand creativity gives us a comparative advan-tage for future growth. There is a huge marginfor increasing the efficiency of our resourceuse through innovation:l Turning coal into light is still only 3% effi-cient;l Only 15% of the energy you put in yourpetrol tank is used to actually move your cardown the road;l 80% of what we produce is used once thendiscarded;l 80% of the world’s resources are used by20% of its population; andl Only 1% of the valuable rare earth metalsthat we use in products are recycled at the end

of the product’s life.By being the first to tackle these inefficien-

cies, we will get first-mover advantage in globalmarkets for our technologies.

But innovation is not enough. As an econ-omist, I learned that the first rule of competi-tiveness is the rational allocation of resources,and in our markets we use prices to do that.But how can we be expected to be rational andefficient, if the prices bear little relation to thevalue of those resources? Most raw materialsare traded and managed pretty well, but we willnever manage other valuable resources suchas water or forests properly as long as there isno incentive to do so. We have to use market-based instruments to provide those incentives.

Hard to swallowHere we reach the more difficult aspect of therelationship between resource efficiency andcompetitiveness in Europe. I will not hide thefact that the relative prices of some resourceswill need to increase. Nor will I hide the factthat our levels of consumption will need to bereduced. These messages are not easy for in-dustry to swallow, so let me tackle them headon.

First, it may seem counter-intuitive to sug-gest that increasing prices of some inputs canmake us more competitive, but that is becausewe take a short-term perspective. Not only willgetting prices right mean we manage re-sources better, it will mean we manage themsustainably and avoid hitting those walls Imentioned earlier. We should not kid our-selves that we can go on relying on cheap re-sources; we need to provide the right pricingsignals in a predictable way that gives indus-try the time to invest in ensuring that re-source productivity keeps pace with resourcecosts.

Second, when we talk about reduced con-sumption, what we are actually saying is less“stuff ”, but that does not mean less profit. Weneed to develop smarter products that do thesame with fewer resources. And we need to sellthe associated services. We need new businessmodels that encourage greater value added,

and more life-cycle thinking, such as chemicalleasing. And we need to develop the financingtools and the skills to ensure that there are nobottlenecks to developing these approaches.

Get togetherI want the European Commission’s ‘Roadmapfor a resource-efficient Europe’ to be seen as apartnership of old adversaries. Just as the 2009climate and energy package of legislation toreduce CO2 emissions from new cars andtransport fuels brought together the two sidesof the argument who together could actuallymake things happen, I want environment andindustry to get together to recognize that theenvironment and the economy must coexistand depend on each other.

Antonio Tajani, European Commissionerfor Industry and Entrepreneurship, and I arealready on the same wavelength, but achievingour ambition of decoupling Europe’s growthfrom resource depletion requires more thanwe have in our Brussels toolkits. We need na-tional action, and we need the private sectoron board.

Europe’s industry ministers will be a cen-tral part of achieving resource efficient growthand I look forward to working with them tomake sure that…doing more with less be-comes our comparative advantage in the 21stcentury. n

Janez Potočnik, speaking at apress conference on theRoadmap towards resource-efficient growth in Europe,September 2011.

“Industry ministers, wedon’t have another planet,so we have no choice butto use more efficiently theresources on this one.”

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By the Gender Mainstreaming SteeringCommittee of the UN Industrial DevelopmentOrganization (UNIDO)

UNIDO’s mandate focuses on promotingindustrial development for povertyreduction, inclusive globalization, andenvironmental sustainability. This cannotbe achieved without taking into accountthe full economic potential of women. Webelieve that expanding economicopportunities for women should becentral to all development responses and

Gender-sensitiveindustrial development

Shea butter-producing women’sgroup receivingtraining, Mali.

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systems, product certification andmarketing; and linking them tointernational markets where they can selltheir products.

In the northern region of Morocco,UNIDO has developed anentrepreneurship programme to improvethe income opportunities of the ruralpopulation, while enhancing thecompetitiveness of small-scale olive oilproducing, textiles, and fruit andvegetable-drying groups managed bywomen. The women participating in the

programme have experienced a 40%increase in productivity and a 50%increase in earnings. In addition, a strongnetwork of local support institutions inproduction technology, businessmanagement, and marketing has beenestablished. As a result, the womenentrepreneurs are better organized, makebetter use of local raw materials, and selltheir products locally and internationally.Furthermore, and while respectingcultural values, the project has also helpedto economically empower rural women:they now create wealth and employ others,and their standing within their familiesand communities has improved.

Education, both formal and non-formal,is necessary if we want women and girls tohave access to decent work and be able toimprove their standards of living. UNIDOassists developing countries in addressingthe discriminatory attitudes and genderstereotypes in the education system, bypromoting education and skills acquisitionfor industrial development through theEntrepreneurship CurriculumProgramme. The programme deliverspractical hands-on entrepreneurshipcourses to young boys and girls insecondary and vocational schools. Withinthese courses, girls are encouraged to takenon-traditional entrepreneurial initiativesthat challenge the stereotypes of societyand develop a positive attitude towardsentrepreneurship, business, and self-employment. The project was launched in2001 in Uganda, and has expanded toseveral other countries. In the period 2006-2009, the courses were delivered in a totalof 1,397 schools, reaching out to more than416,000 students.

Women, particularly in rural areas,spend a significant proportion of their dayengaged in fuel collecting activities, oftenhaving to travel long distances. In suchendeavours they become exposed topotential risks of violence, rape and

“Investing in gender-sensitiveindustrial development has amultiplier effect onproductivity, efficiency andsustained economic growth,as well as strengtheningwomen’s rights.”

policies, with a focus on gender-sensitiveemployment creation, the provision ofproductive resources, such as finance,market-information, technology, skills andsustainable energy, and simultaneousinvestment in care services that reducesthe burden on women’s unpaid domesticand care work. UNIDO therefore pursuesthe goal of the economic empowerment ofwomen through gender-sensitiveindustrial development policy advice,technical cooperation programmes, andorganizational strategies, in conjunctionwith full gender mainstreaming at theinstitutional level.

In our policy advice and technicalcooperation programmes, we primarilyfocus on transferring skills andtechnologies to assist women in enteringthe labour market, both in formal and self-employment. UNIDO has accumulatedover 30 years of expertise in women’sentrepreneurship development, usingvarious tools and mechanisms such ascapacity-building at policy, institutionaland enterprise levels; creating an enablingenvironment for women entrepreneurs bystrengthening business support services;and helping women entrepreneurs gainaccess to productive and financialresources. We also organize womenentrepreneurs into clusters to facilitatetheir collective access to raw materials,information, technology, and markets.

For example, one of UNIDO’s ongoingprojects in the southern part of Mali, oneof the poorest regions in Africa, is buildingthe capacity of women’s groups to produceshea products. Shea butter is a productthat is very popular in cosmetic productsdue to its considerable health and beautybenefits. How are we helping thesewomen’s groups to capitalize on thisdemand? By introducing them toappropriate technologies that increasetheir productivity; raising awareness andproviding training on quality control ‰

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By GILLIAN GAYNAIR, writer and editor forthe International Centre for Research onWomen

Women’s economic empowerment iscritical for reducing poverty and achievingbroader health and developmentobjectives. However, there is limitedevidence on how programmes caneconomically empower women and whichmeasures can be used to know whetherprogrammes are effective.

No single programme can address everyunderlying influence in the process toeconomically advance women. Instead,those working in global economicdevelopment should choose an areawithin the process where they can makethe most difference – and measure itsimpact, according to a paper by theInternational Center for Research onWomen (ICRW).

The brief paper defines women’seconomic empowerment and provides aframework developed by ICRW to guidethe design, implementation andevaluation of economic advancementprogrammes. The framework is built onconcepts that ICRW experts gatheredfrom existing literature and from theirexperience of integrating economicempowerment for women intoprogrammes and evaluating it.

“An increasing number of governments,corporations and donor organizationsrecognize that women’s involvement inthe global marketplace is critical toalleviating poverty,” said Anne Golla, asenior economist and evaluation specialistat ICRW. “But it became clear to us thatmany are unsure how to determinewhether their work – and investments – isindeed economically empoweringwomen.”

“We believe ICRW’s framework will helpprovide some guidance to practitioners,donors and other researchers working onthe issue,” she said.

However, Golla stressed that for awoman living in impoverished conditionsto arrive at a point where she is armedwith the ability to make her own financialdecisions and succeed economically, is acomplex, multidimensional process.“There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach toensure the success of programmes thatfocus on and want to measure women’s

Measuring women’s economicempowerment

abuse. The availability of modern, off-grid energy sources would greatly ease thisdomestic burden and allow them to pursueeducation, economic and otheropportunities. It would also reduce theirexposure to harmful fumes, and providethem with the necessary energy to developrural and cottage industries. In addition totechnical cooperation programmesdelivering decentralized energy solutionsin rural areas, UNIDO, together with ourpartners in UN-Energy and the SecretaryGeneral’s High-level Group on SustainableEnergy for All, is therefore working activelyat the global level to raise awareness of thecrucial role of energy access for sustainabledevelopment and women's economicempowerment.

UNIDO is at the forefront of efforts topromote sustainable industrialdevelopment through its Green IndustryInitiative. The aim is to achieve resource-efficient and low-carbon industrialproduction, by ensuring that industriesaround the world adopt cleanerproduction methods, techniques andpolicies. This also applies to micro-industries in rural areas, where women areheavily involved. UNIDO promotes thetransfer of cleaner production methodsand solutions that can substitute fortraditional approaches, thereby reducingthe emission of greenhouse gases, andimproving the livelihoods of women andtheir communities.

These are only a few practical examplesof how investing in gender-sensitiveindustrial development has a multipliereffect on productivity, efficiency andsustained economic growth, as well asstrengthening women's rights.Empowering women yields the highestreturns of all development investment,and UNIDO will continue to invest inwomen and girls and ensure they aremainstreamed and benefit from industrialdevelopment activities. n

‰

“No single programme canaddress every underlyinginfluence in the process toeconomically advance women.”

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economic empowerment,” she said. “Itdepends on the context in which you’reworking and which underlying factors thatcontribute to women’s empowermentyou’re trying to address.”

Those factors vary, according to ICRW’spaper. They can include the resourcesavailable to help a woman prosper, such asskills training and loans, to theinstitutions that determine how thoseresources reach her, such as legal bodies.Each influences a woman’s path toeconomic empowerment.

The key to creating meaningfuleconomic empowerment programs is toselect a slice of this complex economicempowerment process where the mostimpact can be made – given the projecttimeframe and funding – and concentrateon that. ICRW also recommends that theproject’s evaluation should align with theparticular slice it chooses to address.

To provide more guidance, ICRW offerswithin its measurement framework severalexamples of indicators of success, not onlyat the individual and household level butat the community and institutional level,too.

“Measuring women’s economicempowerment is akin to measuringoutcomes for poverty reduction,” notedAnju Malhotra, ICRW’s vice president ofresearch, innovation and impact and a co-author of the paper. “It’s a complex processbut it can and should be measured.”l Understanding and Measuring Women’sEconomic Empowerment was published bythe ICRW in October 2011.

By Soroptimist International of the Americas

Despite decades of anti-discriminationlaws and changes in the policies ofcompanies and businesses worldwide,women are still not earning as much asmen do in the workplace. As such, a genderpay gap exists across the globe. It is acomplex problem calling for multi-levelsolutions. Some of these measures include:

EducationOne of the most important strategies forensuring that girls and boys will have equalincome-earning opportunities as adults isto give them equal access to education.Also needed is promotion of careers inscience, technology, engineering andmathematics in ways that appeal to womenand girls, as well as encouraging girls totake advanced courses in mathematics. Inaddition, increasing resources for non-traditional skills training and improvingaccess to vocational training – especiallyfor single mothers – is critical. Alsoimportant is providing information togirls and young women still in schoolabout career options, as too many havebeen discouraged from pursuing highereducation and/or job training foroccupations not traditionally held bywomen.

Girls and women, however, should feelfree to study for careers in teaching,nursing and care-giving, and other so-called “pink ghetto” jobs, and not view this

work as demeaning or insignificant. Jobsdo not need to be defined as successful“solely in terms of the money, prestige andobvious power available in sometraditionally male jobs.” A world withnurses and teachers is equally asimportant as a world with lawyers andaccountants. These jobs need to befinancially remunerated and valuedaccording to the work itself and notaccording to gender.

While women and girls in developednations have made great strides witheducation, sometimes surpassing men,school curricula in developing countriesneed to be free of gender biases. As such,governments, parents and internationaldonors “must work together to ensure thatschools are girl-friendly.” This includes,among other measures, ensuring there areschools near girls’ homes (to mitigate longand dangerous commutes) and makingschool facilities safe from gender-basedviolence.

Supporting working familiesLong work hours have a disproportionateimpact on women because they are still themain care providers, “thus reducing theiroptions as to whether they work, wherethey work and in what types of jobs they

work.” As such, governments, industry andbusinesses need to create more family-friendly workplaces and workplacepolicies. The issue is critical as it impactswomen’s earnings, and as such, workplaces need to consider more flexiblehours; provide parental leave and paidleaves of absence for sickness and familycare; offer affordable, high-qualitychildcare arrangements; and encouragethe development of more part-time jobsthat pay well and also have good benefits.Not only are such policies/benefits goodfor working mothers, but they also benefitbusinesses that need to attract a femaleworkforce if they want to survive theretirement of large numbers of “babyboomers.”

In addition, if working mothers earnedas much as men, their income wouldincrease by 17% and their poverty ratewould halve from 25.3% to 12.6%. Alsoneeded are supports for women-headedhouseholds. “Families headed by singlemothers who face discrimination andlower earnings in the labour market aremuch more likely to live in poverty.”Therefore, these women need improvedchildcare support and access to vocationaltraining.

While many businesses provide family-friendly environments, the culture of thatorganization may still foster backlash, guiltand discrimination. Some women workersfeel that organizations pay lip service tofamily-friendly policies, but there remainsan unspoken feeling that employees whouse these policies are not as committed tothe organization. Others have stated thatwhile employers offer balancedwork/personal policies on paper,employees often find it difficult to takeadvantage of these policies in reality.

Better data and analysisAlthough there are sufficient studies toshow that women tend to work more and

“Governments, industryand businesses need tocreate more family-friendly workplaces andworkplace policies.”

Solutions tothe genderpay gap

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earn less than men, more detailed analysesof the issue are needed. Governments needto collect and share reliable nationalearnings data from which the respectivenational gender pay gaps can be calculatedand compared. This would allow the“identification of possible ways of dealingwith the problem in a targeted mannerand to identify possible improvements toexisting legal frameworks likely to lead to asignificant reduction in the pay gap.”

Training women to ask for more payWomen need to assume that most thingsin their lives are negotiable, and that they

don’t have to accept the status quo as rigidand settle for what they’re offered. “Thisone mental adjustment can produceextraordinary results for women.” Inaddition to thinking of the world as amore negotiable place, women can beginthinking differently about negotiation –seeing it as an opportunity to benefiteveryone involved rather than as anaggressive or adversarial act. “In this way,they can reframe their negotiations in waysthat make them feel more comfortablewith the whole process.”

Today’s younger generation of women,may be more comfortable with discussing

their salaries and their earning power as awhole, and as such, may negotiate forbetter salaries. For these women, salaryinformation is openly discussed, at leastamong friends. Several workers under 25said that “greater salary transparencyamong friends only makes sense in an agewhen so much information is freelyavailable online.” Such sharing of salaryinformation helps women to know whento push for a raise, when to start lookingfor another job or when it might benecessary to pursue legal action.l Extract from the Soroptimist white paper: The Gender Wage Gap

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A domestic worker,Bangalore, India.

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Looking ahead to the next issue that focuses onthe coming Industrial Revolution, Making Itinterviewed DR. MUSTAFA HATIPOĞLU, who ismanaging director of the International Centrefor Hydrogen Energy Technologies (ICHET), aUNIDO project supported by the TurkishMinistry of Energy and Natural Resources.

A hydrogen economy – a system ofdelivering energy using hydrogen – isproposed as a solution to some of thenegative effects of using hydrocarbonfuels. What might a hydrogen economylook like in practice?Currently, the world relies heavily onfossil fuel products to provide aconsiderable proportion of our presentenergy needs. A hydrogen economy wouldmean using hydrogen at every instancewhere fossil fuels are used. Hydrogen is agas that can be burned in a mannersimilar to natural gas or it can be used toproduce electricity using a device called afuel cell. It is possible to be used as a directreplacement for petroleum products ininternal combustion engines, heatingappliances, and similar applications. As anelemental gas, it does not contain carbonand its combustion cannot release carbonproducts into the atmosphere, renderingits use totally clean.

Hydrogen is found, bound with oxygenin water, or with carbon in methane andother compounds. In order to release thehydrogen, we have to supply energyobtained from other sources. Thus, it

cannot be considered to be a primarysource of energy, but more of an energyvector or carrier.

The benefits of using renewable energysources, such as sun, wind, geothermal,hydroelectric, or tides, are well known.However, a problem shared by manyrenewable energy sources is that they areintermittent, meaning that they are onlyavailable at certain times. For example,solar energy is only available during theday, wind energy cannot be extractedduring periods of calm, and hydropoweris only available when streams are in fullspate. This means that for an electricitygrid to be able to meet peak demand thereneeds to be some form of storage of thepower derived from intermittent sources,to smooth over the periods when thesesources are not productive. Hydrogen isan excellent method of providing suchstorage. During times when there excesselectricity is being produced, it can beconverted to hydrogen through waterelectrolysis; and conversely, at times ofpeak demand, the stored hydrogen can beconverted back to electricity. Since everyregion of each country has its share of

renewable resources, energy would beproduced and used locally, rather thanbeing imported and distributed. One of the main aspects of a hydrogeneconomy is the widespread use ofhydrogen fuel cell vehicles. How do thesevehicles work? Fuel cells consist of sets of membranes, orsolid electrolytes, sandwiched between gasinlets for hydrogen on one side, andoxygen or air on the other. Whenhydrogen gas comes into contact with theelectrolyte plate, electrons are stripped ofhydrogen atoms and the positivelycharged protons migrate through theelectrolyte until they combine withoxygen molecules on the opposite surfaceto form water vapour. The strippedelectrons form an electric current as theytravel through an external circuit. Themore gas that is applied, the moreelectrons flow, and the larger the current.

Fuel cells can be used instead of batteriesin electric cars and other vehicles. Thetime needed to recharge a battery pack willtypically be up to eight hours, whereas it

Ushering ina hydrogeneconomy

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Dr. Mustafa Hatipoğludemonstating ICHET’s H2Ecocart at the Hydrogenand Fuel Cell Exhibition inHanover, Germany.

“The clean hydrogentechnology era is coming –climate change, the depletionof fossil fuels, and the issue ofcountries’ energy securitymake it inevitable. ”

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takes just matter of minutes to fill a tankwith compressed hydrogen gas. Batteryvehicles typically have ranges around130km, whereas recent fuel cell vehiclescan manage 500-800 km. Conversely,fuel cells are more expensive to purchaseand have lower energy conversionefficiencies than batteries.Could you summarize the state of theworldwide drive to increase the use ofhydrogen fuel cell vehicles?Currently, almost every majorinternational automotive manufactureris developing a hydrogen-fueled vehicle,either around a modified internalcombustion engine or a fuel cellconfiguration. Similarly, almost everymajor petrol company is diversifyinginto renewable energies, with hydrogenplaying a major role. Thus, there will beautomotive companies able to supplyvehicles, and fuel companies able tosupply fuel. The trick will be to get bothin adequate numbers. We expect to soonsee vehicles being deployed inCalifornia and parts of Germany wherethe infrastructure will exist. There willalso be hydrogen filling points in anumber of cities outside these regions.This will form a nucleus that may allowthe infrastructure to spread. If thepolitical will is in place to provideincentives of various kinds for the useof hydrogen-based systems, there willalways be entrepreneurs ready andwilling to exploit possible new productsand concepts. Thus, the key area is therecognition by national governmentsthat the introduction of cleanertransportation technologies requirestheir considerable support andcollaboration.

Today, the world is concentrating onelectric battery cars rather thanhydrogen fuel cell vehicles because theyare cheaper, but this will change oncethe public becomes aware of the

limitations of electric battery vehiclesdue to their short driving ranges andlong charging times. The need forcontinuous and longer driving rangeswill promote the implementation ofhydrogen fuel cell vehicles and theirinfrastructure. The implementationdate of 2015 may shift to 2020 or a littlelater, but in any case the clean hydrogentechnology era is coming – climatechange, the depletion of fossil fuels, andthe issue of countries’ energy securitymake it inevitable.Is the hydrogen economy justsomething for the rich countries todevelop, or does the concept havesomething to offer developing countriestoo?Hydrogen-based technologies arecertainly not cheap in comparison withthe current costs of fossil fuels. However,as petrol prices rise, either throughincreased competition from developingcountries or by the slow but inexorabledepletion of resources, there will come atime when the costs of conventional andunconventional energy technologiesbecome more equal, and the advantagesof being clean and renewable will be yetmore attractive. At that time, hydrogenwill be a must for all countries, not onlythe developed and industrialized ones.Many developing countries, such asChina, India, Malaysia, South Africa, andTurkey, already have developed, or aredeveloping, hydrogen programmes, andthey can be expected to embrace thehydrogen economy. It may well turn outthat these countries will be able toexport energy as hydrogen to theindustrialized North. Already, schemesare being considered to export energyderived from the enormous windpotential of the Atlantic coastline ofMorocco and Mauritania, possibly bytransporting hydrogen by pipeline toEurope. n

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Azim, Firdous and Sultan, Maheen (eds) – MappingWomen’s Empowerment: Experiences fromBangladesh, India and Pakistan

Edigheji, Omano – Constructing a democraticdevelopmental state in South Africa: Potentials andchallenges

Eisenstein, Heather – Feminism Seduced: How GlobalElites Use Women’s Labour and Ideas to Exploit theWorld

Iversen, Torben and Rosenbluth, Frances – Women,Work, and Politics: The Political Economy of GenderInequality

Jacka, Tamara and Sargeson, Sally (eds) – Women,Gender and Development in Rural China

Kristof, Nicholas and WuDunn, Sheryl – Half the Sky:Turning Oppression into Opportunity for WomenWorldwide

Marais, Hein – South Africa Pushed to the Limit: ThePolitical Economy of Change

Pearson, Ruth and Sweetman, Caroline – Gender andthe Economic Crisis

Polak, Paul – Out of Poverty: What Works WhenTraditional Approaches Fail

Shiva, Vandana – Staying Alive. Women, Ecology andDevelopment

Visvanathan, Nalini, Duggan, Lynn et al. (eds) – TheWomen, Gender and Development Reader

World Bank – 2012 World Development Report onGender Equality and Development

http://wiego.org – Women in Informal Employment:Globalizing and Organizing is a global action-research-policy network that seeks to improve thestatus of the working poor, especially women, in theinformal economy.

http://womenatthetop.ft.com – Financial Times blogabout women’s advancement, fairness and equalityin the business arena, and the world’s mostprominent women in business.

www.awid.org – The Association for Women’s Rights inDevelopment is an international, feminist,membership organization committed to achievinggender equality, sustainable development andwomen’s human rights.

www.icrw.org – The International Centre for Researchon Women works to make women in developingcountries an integral part of alleviating globalpoverty.

www.learningpartnership.org – Women’s LearningPartnership is an international non-governmentalorganization dedicated to women’s leadership andempowerment.

www.pathwaysofempowerment.org – An internationalresearch and communications programme linkingacademics with activists and practitioners to find outwhat works to enhance women’s empowerment.

www.thewip.net – The Women’s InternationalPerspective reports news, world opinion, andcommentary.

www.un.org/womenwatch – Central gateway toinformation and resources on the promotion ofgender equality and the empowerment of womenthroughout the United Nations system.

www.womenofchina.cn – All-China Women’sFederation works to unite and mobilize women totake part in China’s reform, opening-up, andsocialist modernization programmes, and topromote scientific development and socialharmony.

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