Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Tonnoma is the protagonist of her own story of development. 26 years old, illiterate, and married to a man 15 years her senior, Tonnoma lives in a rural area of Burkina Faso. Before finding employment with the Youth Employment and Skills Development Project, she performed household chores and depended on her husband's irregular income to meet the family's needs. His income was not always sufficient, and they lost their fourth child to poverty. Tonnoma's Story: Women's Work and Empowerment in Burkina Faso is based on actual events and the experiences of numerous women. It draws directly from the results of qualitative research on the factors impeding or promoting women's ability to work in Burkina Faso. It offers readers a glimpse into the daily lives of women who live in a rural environment and want to work. This book shows us that emotional relationships matter, that the social and cultural landscape we are born into matters, and that if we want to conduct effective development, we have to listen carefully to the beneficiaries. How do they perceive their circumstances? What influences their behaviors? What helps or hinders women's access to employment-in their view? This book encourages readers to reflect on how to conduct more beneficiary-centered and participatory international development that better responds to realities on the ground.

Behaviour Economics --- Female Employment --- Micro-Enterprise --- Mobile Childcare --- Rural Inclusion --- Skills Development --- Social Policy --- Social Safety Nets --- Youth Employment

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This paper contributes to better understanding firms' discriminatory behavior in the presence of gender-based legal discrimination and its linkages with labor market outcomes for women in a developing country setting. Using data collected through the World Bank Enterprise Surveys in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the paper documents the existence of nonnegligible employer discrimination and limitations in women's autonomy in the presence of a discriminatory environment. Interestingly, these are more pervasive outside the capital city, Kinshasa, which suggests that cultural norms or differences in regulation enforcement may be at play. The paper also finds that firms' discriminatory behavior harms women's labor market outcomes, in their representation among the upper echelons of management and participation in the overall workforce. The negative relationship between restrictions from discriminatory behaviors and female employment is particularly strong in the manufacturing sector.

Africa Gender Policy --- Discrimination --- Employment --- Enterprise Survey --- Female Employment --- Gender --- Gender Bias --- Kinshasa --- Labor Market --- Law and Development --- Poverty Reduction --- Private Sector Development

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

The household enterprise sector has a significant role in the Tanzanian economy. It employs a larger share of the urban labor force than wage employment, and is increasingly seen as an alternative to agriculture as a source of additional income for rural and urban households. The sector is uniquely placed within the informal sector, where it represents both conditions of informal employment and informal enterprise. This paper presents a case study on Tanzania using a mixed approach by combining both quantitative and qualitative analysis to examine the important role of household enterprises in the labor force of Tanzania, and to identify key factors that influence their productivity. Household enterprise owners are similar to typical labor force participants although primary education appears to be the minimum qualification for household enterprise operators to be successful. Access to location matters - good, secure location in a marketplace or industrial cluster raises earnings-and access to transport and electricity is found to have a significant effect on earnings as well. In large urban areas, the biggest constraint faced by household enterprises is the lack of access to secure workspace to run the small business. Although lack of credit is a problem across all enterprises in Tanzania, household enterprises are more vulnerable because they are largely left out of the financial sector either as savers or borrowers. Although HEs are part of the livelihood strategies of over half of households in Tanzania, they are ignored in the current development policy frameworks, which emphasize formalization, not productivity. Tanzania has a large number of programs and projects for informal enterprises, but there is no set of policies and program interventions targeted at the household enterprise sector. This gap exacerbates the vulnerability of household enterprises, and reduces their productivity.

Access to Finance --- Banks & Banking Reform --- Debt Markets --- Employment --- Female employment --- Household enterprises --- Informal economy --- Job creation --- Labor Markets --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Micro enterprises --- Population Policies --- Poverty Reduction --- Poverty reduction --- Returns to education and training --- Self-employment --- Youth --- Tanzania

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Theory suggests several ways in which exporting may benefit women's employment. However, the empirical evidence is mixed and limited, especially for developing countries. This paper uses firm-level survey data for 91 developing countries to estimate the relationship between exporting and the share of women workers at the firm. The analysis pays close attention to endogeneity concerns. First, it proxies a given firms' exports by the average exports of all other firms in the same country-year-industry cell. Second, it exploits the repeated cross-section nature of the data and analyzes how changes over time in exporting activity are associated with changes in the share of women workers. The strategy is more immune to endogeneity problems than pure cross-section regressions. Third, it tests several mechanism or mediating factors as predicted by the theory through which exporting impacts women's employment prospects. The predictions are confirmed in the data, an unlikely scenario if exports were a mere proxy for other correlated drivers of women's employment. The results show a large, positive impact of higher exports on the share of women workers. A conservative estimate is that for each percentage point increase in the ratio of exports to total sales, the share of women workers increases by 0.16 percentage point. Consistent with the theoretical predictions, this positive relationship is much larger (more positive) in industries that rely more on women workers, in country-industry pairs where competitive pressure is largely from international markets in comparison to less competitive domestic markets, when social attitudes and labor laws are more favorable toward women's work, and when the law and order situation is more business friendly.

Export Competitiveness --- Exports --- Female Employment --- Female Labor Force Participation --- Female Workers --- Gender --- Gender and Development --- Gender and Economics --- Global Value Chain --- Globalization --- International Economics and Trade --- Labor Markets --- Private Sector Development --- Private Sector Economics --- Trade --- Trade Policy --- Women Workers

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This paper analyzes the magnitude and predictors of misreporting on intimate partner and sexual violence in Nigeria and Rwanda. Respondents were randomly assigned to answer questions using one of three survey methods: an indirect method (list experiment) that gives respondents anonymity; a direct, self-administered method that increases privacy; and the standard, direct face-to-face method. In Rwanda, intimate partner violence rates increase by 100 percent, and in Nigeria, they increase by up to 39 percent when measured using the list method, compared with direct methods. Misreporting was associated with indicators often targeted in women's empowerment programs, such as gender norms and female employment and education. These results suggest that standard survey methods may generate significant underestimates of the prevalence of intimate partner violence and biased correlations and treatment effect estimates.

Africa Gender Policy --- Crime and Society --- Domestic Violence --- Female Employment --- Gender --- Gender and Development --- Gender and Law --- Gender and Social Policy --- Gender Innovation Lab --- Gender Norms --- Social Conflict and Violence --- Social Development --- Violence Against Women --- Women's Empowerment