Building Bridges for Women's Economic Empowerment

What is the Building Bridges programme?

The Building Bridges for Women’s Economic Resilience is a five-year programme implemented by Win-Win Strategies and our partners with the support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of The Netherlands. The programme includes activities in The Netherlands and in Kenya and aims to advance women’s economic rights and resilience in floriculture, tea and other supply chains.

What is Women's Economic Resilience?

The Building Bridges for Women’s Economic Empowerment programme takes a holistic approach to realising women’s economic empowerment and resilience across the value chain. We encourage collaboration between women’s rights organisations and the private sector in order to reach both a social and business return on investment. By leveraging the expertise of local women’s rights organisations and the voices of women workers themselves, we strive to find a ‘win-win’ for both the workers and the business. This 5-year programme focuses on sectors and geographies that are key to both The Netherlands market and international trade. With this in mind, we are currently implementing this programme in the Kenyan floriculture and tea sectors.

A holistic and synchronised approach

to women’s economic resilience

Drawing The Line Tool

The ‘Drawing the Line’ tool uses a play-based, participatory approach to identify key issues that women face in the workplace, taking a women-centred approach as their perspective is crucial for determining a sustainable solution. Participants create their own meaning by using cards as prompts and tell the facilitators, who are from Women’s Rights Organisations in their area, what their realities are and where/how protection can be implemented. It is often used in conjunction with other tools/standards, such as zero-tolerance standards for abuse and harassment and codes of conduct.

Sharing Knowledge

Women’s economic empowerment (WEE) basically means enabling women to earn a decent living. It has taken on a variety of definitions and some- times, even at the highest levels, is used without definition (e.g. the Beijing Platform for Action, or the 2017 UN High Level Panel reports on WEE). Pro- ponents differ in defining the how and why to achieve WEE. How to tackle the wicked problems of poverty, exclusion, exploitation and gender inequal- ity? And ‘why’? Because WEE is a right irrespective of economic context or instrumental to sustained development or simply to drive business growth?

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GRDD can be understood as the process through which enterprises can identify, prevent, mitigate and account for how they address their actual and poten- tial adverse impacts on women’s rights and gender equality as an integral part of business decision-mak- ing and risk management systems. Effective GRDD ensures that enterprises ‘do no harm’ to women, and usually, prevention and mitigation measures will ‘do good’ to women by enhancing their economic empowerment, e.g. where gender committees established in global value chains enhance women’s job security, career perspectives, and protection against violence. GRDD is an important avenue to achieving WEE/R. Like WEE/R, GRDD can only be fully implemented when there is a compelling business case for addressing adverse gender impacts.

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Fostering meaningful

cross-sector collaborations

Corporate Engagement Course

The Seven Stage Corporate Engagement Course is designed to help you respond quickly, and thoughtfully to the rising demand for cross-sector partnerships to address the gaping inequities now laid bare by the COVID-19 crisis. Win-Win Strategies (WWS) developed this Corporate Engagement course, designed as a series of online, self-paced learning modules, with the belief that partnerships can improve the impact and strengthen the capabilities of both private sector companies and women’s rights organisations.