Gender Equality: GrOW East Africa Initiative Registers Positive Outcomes

By Joyce Ojanji

The Growth and Economic Opportunities for Women (GrOW)- East Africa initiative has produced desirable outcomes in the quest to advance gender equality in the region.

Journalists were told during a press briefing at the end of program workshop in Nairobi, Kenya.

The five year GrOW initiative was jointly funded by The Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC).

With a focus on Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda, GrOW- East Africa supported locally grounded in-depth action research to provide evidence, practical tools and guidance to inform policies and actions to build back a better and more equal world for women.

Annet Abenakyo Mulema, Senior Program Officer, IDRC, noted that the goal was to enhance the effectiveness of evidence-informed policies, programs, and interventions on unpaid care work and gender segregation of work to address persistent gender economic gaps in Eastern Africa.

She observed that the project did so by forging partnerships with local communities and public and private sector actors to identify and scale successful solutions for achieving women’s economic empowerment and gender equality in the world of work.

‘’Our main goal for this initiative is really to ensure that the evidence we generate gets into policy. So working closely with policy actors was part and parcel of this initiative to cultivate interest, but also ensuring that we move the needle, we get this evidence to inform policy, but also practice,’’ Mulema said.

She noted that the first phase of the project identified the barriers to women’s economic empowerment and the barriers that emerged around the uneven distribution of unpaid care work and gender labor market segregation among others.

“These barriers really hinder women’s participation in the labor market but also their participation in other spaces like politics,” Mulema said.

The initiative supported four care policy projects in Ethiopia, Uganda and Rwanda which tested novel approaches and tools for providing rapid and tailored guidance for care policy processes, capacity building of evidence users and developing women economic empowerment communities of practice to drive change. The research took an intersectional approach and considered the needs, priorities and constraints of different categories of women in different contexts.

Three of the projects focused on early childhood development where the researchers noted that quality of the service provider or the child care center was key in motivating women to take their children to these care centers. And where quality was questioned, they noted that the mothers did not really use those facilities.

Additionally, other project done by Partnership for Economic Policy (PEP) looked at employability of students from Technical and vocational education and training (TVET)and how easy it is for them to transit into the labor market.

The researchers found out that soft skill training is very important. Many employers do complain that they get the graduates even from universities who are good, maybe they have first class honors, but they do not have any soft skills at all. The soft skills actually improved the labor market outcomes more for the young women, than for the young men.

There were three projects dealing with government procurement looking at different models and interventions that could enhance the ability of women in business to benefit from government procurement opportunities.

‘’Research has shown that actually government procurement has a very high potential to empower women economically. But Normally it’s like 1% or less how women really benefit from these opportunities. So the government have put in place measures to ensure that the portion of the procurement opportunities is targeted to the girls, people with disability, and also the youth,” she said.

The projects trained women in business and also worked closely with actors along the procurement chain inluding public procurement regulation authorities, those that handle revenue to build the capacities of the women and also build the capacities on the supply side to ensure that women are able to access these government opportunities.

‘’About 50% of the women that had tried to apply for tenders were able to access these tenders. And it’s work in progress. There are some who succeed, some didn’t. There’s this kind of a reverse process, but it’s because of some of the underlying factors that women will grapple with. And the policy engagement is key for our projects,’’ she added.