Girls’ Economic Empowerment: partnership and Thought Leadership results

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday II)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Girls’ economic empowerment: results of a global project and insights in the underlying partnership

Proposal

Education drives economic empowerment and social mobility. Programming related to building financial and life skills education supports a holistic approach to women’s economic empowerment that includes the promotion of enabling environments from very early in life.

By increasing both the financial capability of girls as well as awareness of their social and economic rights, they can better fulfil their potential and take advantage of economic opportunities as they transition into adulthood. This is essential in order to address the barriers to gender equality more broadly, and particularly in rural settings.

In 2014 a partnership was formed between Credit Suisse, Plan International and Aflatoun with the foremost aim to meet girls’ needs by the delivery of the Financial Education and Life Skills (FELS) programme for adolescent girls across four countries (Brazil, China, India and Rwanda). In 2018, another long term partner of Credit Suisse, Room to Read, joined the FELS programme and began implementing in two new countries (Tanzania and Sri Lanka).

The presenter will introduce each partner involved based on the figure below and discuss the different phases the partnership has gone through over time. She will also touch on the lessons learnt and ideas on ensuring a sustainable partnership.

Figure 1: Partnership structure

The panellist concludes with some of the Thought Leadership that Aflatoun realised aiming to explore the effectiveness of financial education on adolescent girls. The first contribution to this was a published Policy Brief based on research that examines different intervention models for adolescent girls’ economic empowerment.

Second, Aflatoun performed four case studies, in which the effectiveness of the programmes in the four countries Brazil, India, China and Rwanda is assessed. The panellist will elaborate on the research methods used. Also, she will dive deeper into the relation between the endline results and the Thought Leadership results if time allows.

Author

• Aukje te Kaat, Aflatoun International