Outcome APA_D_2.2

More women lead, participate and have access to business opportunities to advance sustainable and inclusive growth (Outcome 7)

Significant Progress was made in supporting more women to lead, participate and have access to business opportunities to advance sustainable and inclusive growth. Women-owned businesses (WOBs) and women entrepreneurs have become more gender inclusive, better equipped to scale and improve business performance, have established relevant connections with financing mechanisms and facilitated other partnership opportunities. WEA strengthened capacities of women entrepreneurs and women-owned businesses, especially through innovative ecosystem approaches in areas such as unpaid care and gender-lens investing. Overall, entrepreneurs reported that the WEA entrepreneurship trainings had the biggest impact in: helping their businesses become more gender inclusive (29.9%) gaining knowledge and tools to up-scale their businesses (23.2%) improving business performance, establish relevant connections and identify financing mechanisms (18%) (please refer to Final report in supporting document as evidence.) WEA mobilized and trained 3,096 women across all WEA countries (since programme inception in 2019) that aimed to increase access to entrepreneurship and leadership training programmes (e.g., business training, financial education and/or technical skills).To measure the effectiveness and impact of capacity-building activities, particularly those focused on entrepreneurship, WEA developed a set of impact-based surveys to collect data from entrepreneur beneficiaries who participated in various trainings across the WEA countries. A total of 353 responses were received from women entrepreneurs and WOBs across the WEA countries between September 2021 – August 2022. UN Women’s holistic approach to work with governments and private sector towards an ecosystem for advancing women’s economic empowerment has contributed to the above results. It encouraged the central role of the private sector in advancing women’s economic empowerment (WEE) and promoting a gender-inclusive economic recovery. Working with the private sector, commitment and actions from the private sector to drive more responsible business conduct, have been leveraged during the reporting period. Building on the successful implementation of the WEPs Awards 2021, WEA organized the third WEPs regional awards to recognize exemplary business practice for gender equality aligned to the Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs). This year, the Awards generated significant interest, resulting in 1208 applications this year compared to 700 received in 2021 (cumulative values). The success of the WEPs Awards establishes it as a powerful vehicle at both national and regional level to raise awareness of the WEPs among key stakeholders, create openings for collaboration, and mobilize the private sector to commit to and act to become more gender inclusive. UN Women’s knowledge products have also reached a wide audience and significantly contributed to UN Women’s holistic COVID-19 response and specially to address unpaid care work and awareness-raising and public advocacy for a gender-responsive recovery has also been essential. Its efforts will also seed interest in a larger regional agenda on the care economy that will capitalize on Asia-Pacific global moments in 2023. For instance, the WEPs “Trends and Opportunities to Advance Gender Equality in Business in Asia and the Pacific” developed and launched by UN Women in 2022 provides valuable insights on the progress made by companies on the level and depth of promoting WEPs and gender equality across supply chains and highlights gaps where actions are still needed. UN Women built further momentum and awareness on the Care Economy through the development and launch of the Care Entrepreneurship Think Piece entitled ‘Can Inclusive Care Entrepreneurship be a pathway to address gaps in the childcare sector in Asia and the Pacific?‘ and disseminating key findings from the Think Piece in various fora including during the WEA Closing Forum in August 2022 and the 2022 Asian Venture Philanthropy Network (AVPN) Global Conference in Indonesia. On the theory of change, there also remains a need to assess how the Programme has affected and can support the most marginalized women. While UN Women Country Office efforts target the most marginalized groups in most cases, the WEA project targeted middle-income countries as well as the “missing middle” of women-owned SMEs as strategic entry points to demonstrate gender-responsive business models. Linking these different target groups in integrated programme approaches could be explored, for example, through the work on gender-responsive procurement (GRP). Efforts to expand and increase the income of women-led SMEs could promote their inclusion in supply chains of large companies, including multinational enterprises. In turn, these SMEs could be mobilized to employ and source products and services from relatively more disadvantaged women in the community. Similarly, efforts to reduce the disproportionate share of women in unpaid care work could target marginalized women to gain access to decent work and income (including in the care economy itself), through improved access to and availability of affordable child and elder care. Social norms change is WEE with a view to working across the individual, systemic, formal, and informal levels to stimulate transformative change. It will require UN Women to leverage its expertise in research and data, generation and dissemination of knowledge products, advocacy, and holistic approaches to capacity building of actors to influence policy changes and support implementation of gender-responsive practices at all levels. It will also necessitate clarifying how synergies across thematic areas will be leveraged and identifying opportunities where UN Women could be positioning itself for the future. An important learning is that programmatic efforts have reiterated that private sector engagement is fundamental in the journey to advancing women’s economic empowerment and gender equality. Resource mobilization to maintain the visibility on WEE achieved through WEA and the Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs) approach has a critical role to play in supporting the private sector to implement the WEPs. While WEA constructively engaged with policymakers to identify and propose solutions for challenges faced by women in the private sector, securing buy-in and advancing policy level changes proved to be very lengthy and required significant efforts. Targeted and prolonged capacity building of public stakeholders will be necessary for transformational legislation and gender mainstreaming practices. Moreover, with increased requirements for accountability set by and among governments and investors, Transparency & Accountability will continue to be a key priority area for future normative and policy work. Three years was a limited amount of time to fully implement and document the impacts of all the various assets created. As such, a key challenge moving forward is the sustainability of the assets created in terms of continued implementation. Resource mobilization to expand WEPs support at field level - beyond the current WEA countries - is critical to ensure a consistent approach.

More women lead, participate and have access to business opportunities to advance sustainable and inclusive growth (Outcome 7)

The Programme developed the first-ever reporting framework aligned to the WEPs, the WEPs Transparency and Accountability Framework, which includes a set of indicators of gender equality across corporate value chains, fully aligned with existing corporate gender quality frameworks. Businesses can use the framework for transparent reporting, with support from governments and other stakeholders, and more effectively work towards a gender equal economy that works for all women and men. To deepen understanding of public and private mechanisms for gender equality aligned to the WEPs, WEA and ILO developed the WEPs ASEAN Ecosystem Landscaping report, which provides policymakers, companies, civil society, employer organizations and other stakeholders in the ASEAN region with comprehensive details on policy gaps and sets out a clear policy roadmap for ASEAN member states to advance more gender-responsive business conduct and especially clear guidance on reporting and implementing Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs)-related policies. Increased commitments and actions from the private sector to drive more responsible business conduct, have been leveraged during the reporting period. The APAC region has been the world's fastest growing region with WEPs signatories [Baseline 2019 (192) and 2021 (1665) signatories]. Additionally, WEA boosted the uptake of the number of companies who have undertaken a gender-assessment through the GAT tool, with an increase of 269 companies across WEA countries and 432 companies in the Asia Pacific region, compared to the previous reporting year. Building on the successful implementation of the 2020 Asia-Pacific WEPs Awards, WEA organized the 2021 WEPs Awards and received nearly doubled the number of applications – from 250 companies with 400 applications in 2020 to 480 companies and 700 applications in 2021. Further, WEA intensified its outreach and capacity-building activities to strengthen private sector commitments. Despite the impacts of the pandemic the WEA programme has especially contributed to get more businesses engaged to commit and implement gender-responsive practices. A key shift in programme activities spurred by COVID-19 was a new workstream to address women’s underpaid and unpaid care work, a long-standing issue that has been exacerbated by the pandemic. One of the most notable achievements of WEA to address this burden in an innovative way has been the work on Care Entrepreneurship in the context of achieving inclusive recovery, where WEA has demonstrated concrete results during the reporting period, notably the implementation of the first ever Care Accelerator. The programme has worked with 13 selected ‘Care Enterprises’ and has increased their capacities to strengthen their business models to become more resilient and inclusive and helped them to be connected to investors, mentors and other entrepreneurs. Further, WEA continued to play an important role in strengthening entrepreneurship capacities among women-owned businesses and women entrepreneurs, with a particular focus on the ‘missing middle’, to contribute to an inclusive recovery and transform businesses to become more gender-responsive, leading to more women having access to decent employment opportunities. For example, the Industry Disruptor is a WEA-led initiative that connects WOBs with larger corporates in the Indian Textile & Fashion industry and E-Commerce Sector to co-develop innovative solutions to address sustainability challenges in the industry while connecting more women with procurement schemes of larger corporates. Building on the success of the first edition, during the reporting year, WEA initiated the second phase of the Industry Disruptor 2.0 in collaboration with The DO School. WEA has also developed a range of capacity-building tools/programmes for entrepreneurs and ecosystem players i.e. the ‘WeRise Programme’ aiming to create more viable and more inclusive business models for SMEs, inclusive of scalable and replicable Accelerator and Entrepreneurship Toolkits, which have been piloted in Thailand and Indonesia. The toolkits aim to (1) increase the ability of women entrepreneurs to assess and access the right sources of finance while becoming inclusive business and WEPs Champions; and (2) increase the ability of acceleration programmes to become more gender inclusive and increase investments in women-led/ benefitting business [Accelerator Toolkits] [Entrepreneurship Toolkits].