This book investigates the barriers to women’s economic empowerment in the Global South. Drawing on evidence from a wide range of countries, the book outlines important lessons and practical solutions for promoting gender equality. Despite global progress in closing gender gaps in education and health, women’s economic empowerment has lagged behind, with little evidence that economic growth promotes gender equality. International Development Research Centre’s (IDRC) Growth and Economic Opportunities for Women (GrOW) programme was set up to provide policy lessons, insights, and concrete solutions that could lead to advances in gender equality, particularly on the role of institutions and macroeconomic growth, barriers to labour market access for women, and the impact of women’s care responsibilities. This book showcases rigorous and multi-disciplinary research emerging from this ground-breaking programme, covering topics such as the school-to-work transition, child marriage, unpaid domestic work and childcare, labour market segregation, and the power of social and cultural norms that prevent women from fully participating in better paid sectors of the economy. With a range of rich case studies from Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Nepal, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Uganda, this book is perfect for students, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers working on women’s economic empowerment and gender equality in the Global South.

"The 2012 report recognized that expanding women's agency - their ability to make decisions and take advantage of opportunities is key to improving their lives as well as the world. This report represents a major advance in global knowledge on this critical front. The vast data and thousands of surveys distilled in this report cast important light on the nature of constraints women and girls continue to face globally. This report identifies promising opportunities and entry points for lasting transformation, such as interventions that reach across sectors and include life-skills training, sexual and reproductive health education, conditional cash transfers, and mentoring. It finds that addressing what the World Health Organization has identified as an epidemic of violence against women means sharply scaling up engagement with men and boys. The report also underlines the vital role information and communication technologies can play in amplifying women's voices, expanding their economic and learning opportunities, and broadening their views and aspirations. The World Bank Group's twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity demand no less than the full and equal participation of women and men, girls and boys, around the world." -- Publisher's description.

"This report examines the distribution and correlates of two different dimensions of the empowerment of currently married women age 15-49 in 23 developing countries"-- P. xv.

Trade can dramatically improve women’s lives, creating new jobs, enhancing consumer choices, and increasing women’s bargaining power in society. It can also lead to job losses and a concentration of work in low-skilled employment. Given the complexity and specificity of the relationship between trade and gender, it is essential to assess the potential impact of trade policy on both women and men and to develop appropriate, evidence-based policies to ensure that trade helps to enhance opportunities for all. Research on gender equality and trade has been constrained by limited data and a lack of understanding of the connections among the economic roles that women play as workers, consumers, and decision makers. Building on new analyses and new sex-disaggregated data, Women and Trade: The Role of Trade in Promoting Gender Equality aims to advance the understanding of the relationship between trade and gender equality and to identify a series of opportunities through which trade can improve the lives of women.

This paper reviews how women in the developing world access and use information and communication technology (ICT). It examines the discourse and controversies surrounding the digital gender divide, including links to poverty and illiteracy. Major themes concerning women and ICTs are explored, such as women in the ICT workforce, how girls and women relate differently to ICT, and opportunities and barriers for women in science and technology in general. Current research relating to gender and ICT is often country-specific and is more prevalent in developed countries than in developing countries. This paper suggests where additional research is needed on barriers to women s entry and access to ICT. The overall objective of this paper is to influence policy dialogue around women and ICT for development by raising awareness of the digital gender divide. Economic opportunity for women in ICT will not be realized until policies address gender considerations and ensure that ICT investment contributes to more sustainable and equitable development.

Ensuring women's economic empowerment and access to and control over resources requires an integrated approach to growth and development, focused on gender-responsive employment promotion and informed by the interdependency between economic and social development. Social objectives need to be incorporated into economic policies. Economic growth strategies should give attention to the real economy and focus on creating a gender-sensitive macroeconomic environment, full employment and decent work, access to land, property and other productive resources as well as financial services, and full coverage of social protection measures. The Survey outlines a number of concrete recommendations in these critical areas, which if adopted, will facilitate women's equitable access to and control over economic and financial resources.

There is general consensus among the international population community that the commitment achieved at the International Conference on Population and Development (Cairo, 1994) to womens empowerment, along with the related goals of improving womens reproductive health and securing theirreproductive rights, represented a paradigm shift in the discourse about population and development, even though there are differences in view whether this is a positive change or not. But while the rhetoric about womens empowerment is pervasive, the concept remains ill-defined, and its relationshipto demographic processes has not been well articulated, either theoretically or empirically. This book brings together leading researchers and policy advocates to explore whether the concept of womens empowerment is indeed useful for an understanding of key demographic processes. Its contributorsidentify new directions for demographic research from the analysis of available data that measure womens empowerment, and point to the implications for population-related policies.Demographic research has focused relatively little to date on gender, let alone the question of power. Yet critiques of available data argue that traditional womens-status indicators, such as education and employment, are often not sensitive enough to capture the nuances of gender power relationsand the ways in which they govern womens and mens reproductive behaviour. This book moves forward to the complex task of conceptualizing, measuring, and analysing womens empowerment. In laying this groundwork, it provides critically important insights into the causes and consequences of populationchange, including migration. The book combines conceptual and empirical research with policy directions and considers the relevance of economic, social, and cultural contexts for the health and well-being of women, adolescents, and children. The countries under study are of both the North and theSouth. This book represents state-of-the-art knowledge on the two-way linkages between womens empowerment and demographic processes.