In This Brief
An Open House about more than gender
The Partnership for Economic Inclusion (PEI), a World Bank hosted platform that brings together governments, NGOs, UN agencies, researchers and funders, recently convened an Open House titled Designing for Empowerment: Economic Inclusion Programs for Women. The session examined how programs are addressing gender specific constraints, and what changes when those constraints are treated as a design problem rather than an afterthought.
Speakers drew on programs in Kenya and Malawi, where community sensitization, women’s empowerment training and couples’ dialogue approaches have shifted decision making dynamics at home and lifted women’s economic participation. A speaker from Bangladesh showed how targeted apprenticeships are widening women’s access to jobs. The session featured moderator Radu Ban, framing presenter Nazia Moqueet, speakers Md. Hasan Khaled, Lynett Ochuma and Adèle Fox, and discussant Tatiana Rincón. Presentations covered Ghana’s Productive Safety Net Project, digital financial inclusion under THRIVE 2030, and the Superate program in the Dominican Republic.
The through line was simple and demanding: gender considerations have to run through program design and delivery, from who is recruited to how a training session is timed.
Targeting women is not the same as designing for them
PEI’s companion publication, Breaking Barriers: Empowering Women through Economic Inclusion Programs, finds that around 90 percent of economic inclusion programs target women, yet only about a third make women’s economic empowerment a core objective. As of 2024, over 400 programs had reached some 70 million people in 88 countries. Women are in the room. Their constraints often are not in the blueprint.
Share of economic inclusion programs, 2024
The gap between the 90 and the 33 is where programs quietly lose women: a training scheduled during the farm’s busiest hours, a cash grant paid to the household head, a group meeting too far to walk to. Empowerment is decided by these details, not by the target.
On the farm, the gap is structural, not personal
The FAO’s 2023 report on women in agrifood systems puts a number on what this costs. On farms of equal size, women’s productivity trails men’s by 24 percent. The FAO attributes this not to skill or effort but to unequal access to land security, inputs, knowledge and technology, plus a heavier burden of unpaid care. In wage work, women earn 82 cents for every dollar men earn. Closing both gaps would add nearly $1 trillion, or about 1 percent, to global GDP and cut the number of food insecure people by 45 million.
Roughly 36 percent of working women worldwide are employed in agrifood systems, and in Southern Asia that rises to 71 percent. When economies shrink, the report notes, women’s jobs are lost first. The food insecurity gap between women and men widened from 1.7 percentage points in 2019 to 4.3 in 2021.
That is why the Open House’s interventions look unfamiliar to a conventional agricultural program. Couples’ dialogue and community sensitization do not train anyone to farm better. They change who controls the income, who owns the decision to buy seed, and whether a woman’s time is hers to invest.
Access: an account is a starting point, not a pathway
Finance is where the Open House’s framing session on “financial pathways” meets the farm. The Global Findex 2025 shows real progress: women’s account ownership in low and middle income economies has nearly doubled since 2011, to 73 percent in 2024. Across Sub Saharan Africa, 52 percent of women held an account in 2024 against 64 percent of men, a 12 point gap that has widened because men have opened accounts faster.
Women’s gap behind men in account ownership, percentage points, 2024
The mobile money picture is more complicated than its reputation. In Sub Saharan Africa, women are equally likely to own only a mobile money account, which suggests the technology can reach women that banks do not. But across low and middle income economies the mobile money gender gap has widened since 2021, and among the region’s unbanked women only about half own a phone at all. Digital financial inclusion, the topic of the THRIVE 2030 presentation, works only where connectivity, trust and agent networks arrive first.
For agricultural lenders and input suppliers, the practical reading is direct: a woman who has an account but no phone, no land title to pledge and no say over the household’s cash cannot use credit well, however affordable it is. Access is a chain, and it breaks at its weakest link.
Climate lands hardest where the gaps are widest
The equality case and the climate case are the same case. The FAO’s 2024 report The Unjust Climate combined household data from 24 low and middle income countries, covering more than 100,000 rural households, with 70 years of daily climate records. On average, female headed households lose 8 percent more of their income to heat stress and 3 percent more to floods than male headed households. That is a gap of $83 and $35 per person respectively, or about $37 billion and $16 billion a year across these economies.
Additional share of income lost versus the comparison group, in an average year
The most important finding is the one that is easy to skim past: women plot managers are as capable as men of adopting climate adaptive practices. They simply lose more income, and more off farm opportunity, when extreme weather arrives. Extreme heat also adds to women’s unpaid workload in poor households. The constraint is access, not ability.
Women farmers do not need convincing to adapt. They need land security, credit, information and time.
Policy has not caught up. Three quarters of agricultural policy documents reviewed across 68 countries acknowledge women, yet fewer than one in five set gender goals. Of more than 4,000 proposals in national climate adaptation plans surveyed by the FAO, only 6 percent mention women.
Share of policies and plans, by how far they go
What the programs did differently
The programs discussed at the Open House share a common method: name the specific constraint, then build the response into delivery.
| Constraint | Design response | Why it matters for farms and climate |
|---|---|---|
| Decisions about income and assets sit with someone else | Couples’ dialogue, community sensitization and empowerment training (Kenya, Malawi) | A woman who controls income can invest in inputs, storage or adaptation |
| Few routes into paid work | Targeted apprenticeships (Bangladesh) | Off farm income cushions households when harvests fail |
| Care duties and distance limit participation | Relocated work sites, piecework, on site childcare (Ghana’s safety net) | Public works that build dams and plant trees reach the women who farm nearby |
| Accounts are held but little used | Digital financial inclusion built into program delivery (THRIVE 2030) | Savings and payments become the base for credit and insurance |
Ghana offers the clearest numbers. Under the second phase of its Productive Safety Net Project, women make up about 69.5 percent of more than 83,000 participants, against a project target of at least 60 percent. A World Bank case study documents how the public works component was adapted to women’s needs, with changed work site locations, piecework to fit time constraints and on site childcare. Those same public works build dams, rehabilitate roads and establish cashew plantations, so women’s inclusion strengthens climate resilience directly.
What to do with this
- Make empowerment an objective, not a target. Write women’s outcomes, such as control of income and time use, into results frameworks.
- Fix the schedule before the curriculum. Time, distance and childcare decide who can attend any training.
- Work with the household. Couples’ dialogue and community engagement address the norms that quietly cap women’s returns.
- Build the chain of access. Connect phones, accounts, land rights and credit rather than funding one link.
- Put women into the climate budget. Adaptation finance and plans should name rural women and fund the services they use.
What the evidence can and cannot tell us
These figures are averages across many countries, and averages hide variation: the FAO’s productivity gap compares farms of equal size, Findex data come from surveys, and the Open House findings from Kenya, Malawi and Bangladesh are program experiences presented in a webinar rather than a single controlled comparison. Where couples’ dialogue works, it works inside particular communities. Treat the evidence as a strong direction of travel, and test locally.
The direction is consistent, though. Where women face fewer constraints, farms are more productive, households are better protected from climate shocks and finance reaches further. Designing for empowerment is not a side project of agricultural development. It is the most direct route to the outcomes that agricultural development is trying to reach.
