Lessons Learned and Not Yet Learned from a Multicountry Initiative on Women's Economic Empowerment

Launched in 2007, the Results-Based Initiatives (RBI) aimed to provide comprehensive, coherent, and rigorous evidence on effective interventions that foster the economic empowerment of women. The RBIs comprised five small pilots with a built-in impact evaluation designed to identify the best method to promote better outcomes for women as entrepreneurs, wage earners, or farmers—under different country contexts. The program was an innovative experiment in an important policy area. Although there is a clear rationale for policy interventions to help remove constraints to women’s economic empowerment, knowledge remains limited on the interventions that work best in different settings. When the RBI were conceived, rigorous evidence in this area was close to nonexistent because no systematic impact evaluations had been carried out in developing countries. However, the RBI fell short of meeting several ambitious objectives. Lessons Learned and Not Yet Learned from a Multicountry Initiative on Women’s Economic Empowerment highlights lessons from the RBI with respect to the impact of the interventions and the dos and don’ts in pilot design and implementation. Regarding the impact on economic opportunities, the interventions did not increase women’s earnings, except in the Peru pilot. In general, women who received training appreciated the access to new information and expressed an increase in their skills and involvement in business associations and networks. However, it is incorrect to conclude that these interventions were not effective. The lack of robust positive impact could be due to evaluations being conducted too soon and being unable to fully show the long-term effects of the interventions. In particular, an early warning system to synchronize the corrections in the interventions with the design of the impact evaluation is clearly needed. The RBIs were overambitious regarding achievement potential on a limited budget and short time frame.