Women's Economic Empowerment

In June, TechnoServe convened a panel of women entrepreneurs to discuss ways to build success for women in business, from Silicon Valley to Kenya.

In Bihar, India, TechnoServe is working with women smallholder farmers to build more transparent and prosperous agricultural value chains, and to access more decision-making roles, on their farms and across the sector.

For International Women's Day, TechnoServe celebrated the people, strategies, and innovations that are hard at work to create equitable and prosperous economies for women and men around the world.

Recognizing that women make up more than half of Uganda's agricultural labor force, AB InBev partnered with TechnoServe to help women farmers access the agricultural and business knowledge they need to build profitable farms and a sustainable supply chain for AB InBev subsidiaries in the country.

Kate Scaife Diaz, TechnoServe’s Director of Impact, discusses results from TechnoServe entrepreneurship projects and highlights how our data shows similar impact among the men and women we work with.

In the Majang Forest of Ethiopia, TechnoServe is working to create sustainable and prosperous forest-based economies by helping women to reduce time spent in drudgery, launch income-generating activities, and enter competitive markets for non-timber forest products.

In an article for the World Economic Forum, TechnoServe's Program Director for Central America Entrepreneurship discusses ways to engage entrepreneurs in practices that not only benefit women workeres and suppliers, but help solve some of the most common issues facing small and medium businesses.

In Ethiopia, 75 percent of the work in the coffee value chain is carried out by women, whereas only 43 percent of the income is earned by those same women. Kebebushe is one of 79 agronomists working with Nespresso to support more than 40,000 coffee farmers with best farming practices, and to improve the status of women throughout the value chain.

Closing the gender gap is essential to economic growth in Africa, where women generally have less access to education, training, financial services, and assets than men do. Dace Mahanay, TechnoServe's Regional Director for the STRYDE program, discusses keys to supporting young women's business success.

Olga Velasquez is TechnoServe’s Monitoring and Evaluation Manager for the Better Coffee Harvests Program in Central America. For International Women’s Day, we talked with her about her experience as a woman at TechnoServe, and why good data is important for creating stronger, more gender-inclusive coffee economies.