I wrote about the constraints that women-owned/led Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) face in my previous post. Unfortunately, these constraints influence and condition these enterprises' performance, making them less productive than what has been observed by their male counterparts. These constraints can either be related to the environment in which women operate their businesses or to household-related factors.
Intending to expand access to markets and finance, the World Bank research team wants to test these underlying constraints by conducting an RCT that will mention the impact of two interventions: bottom-up vs. top-down. Today I will be writing more about the bottom-up approach.
The bottom-up intervention consists of a social gender role training that seeks to empower women to overcome social gender roles and reduce perceived gender barriers. They are also called internal barriers. It is being developed by the World Bank research team and a group of psychologists from the University of Warwick and Leuphana University. This intervention uses an action-oriented training approach to foster proactive behavior, works with role models, and incorporates sessions to integrate women's husbands in the change process. The training focuses on overcoming gender barriers that female entrepreneurs face in their private and business environments.
For this intervention, I got to support the research team with the literature review of similar interventions in different parts of the world. One of the things that surprised me the most is that most academic articles are recent. While that implies that literature is not as broad as it is in other areas, I prefer to think that it is because this topic is gaining relevance, and soon we will see more research done in this area. I was also very excited when I found a similar article from Peru, my home country.