Women’s economic empowerment is at the core of inclusive economic development of communities and countries. Given the many barriers that women and girls face in accessing economic opportunities, UNCDF, UNDP and UN Women came together with an unique approach towards women’s economic empowerment in Bangladesh.

The initiative originated from a global programme titled the “Inclusive Economic and Local Development Programme (IELD)”, funded by Sweden, Switzerland and Norway. The programme sought to facilitate the design, implementation, and sustainability of local investments by governments and the private sector to remove barriers to women’s economic empowerment. The programme also aimed at reversing some of the discriminatory social norms and practices that thwart women’s equitable access to economic opportunities.

To address these challenges, the IELD program engaged the local authorities, project developers and women’s groups to identify, fund and implement women’s economic empowerment projects; built capacities of local government for gender-responsive economic policy, planning and budgeting; and identified practical and innovative financial instruments to channel additional funding for SME financing and capacity building for private sector players including commercial banks and women entrepreneurs.

With a small seed funding, the three agencies UNCDF, UNDP and UN Women are taking a systems approach to address the issue of women’s economic empowerment by building a conducive policy and institutional set up, empowering partner organizations for women’s entrepreneurship to leverage the power of collectivity, and improving access to finance by generating local investments. The approach brings together the programme infrastructure and comparative expertise of the three agencies to generate outstanding returns on the initial seed funding. While the three agencies contribute to different aspects of the programme, by approaching local government officials and partner organizations together, the joint project is also reducing transactions cost for the Government and partners through time saved in meetings, better management of events, and more coherent and smooth information sharing. Joint communication and synchronized collaboration with national and local government actors has also led to better coordinated work and minimized the duplication of efforts.

Original Link (United Nations Bangladesh):

https://bangladesh.un.org/en/168058-together-one-un-womens-economic-empowerment