Women’s Empowerment through Access to Markets: Katchy Kollections, Nairobi, Kenya (original) (raw)

Advisory Note on Measures: Women’s Economic Empowerment

This advisory note is intended to foreground the gaps in the current approach to women economic empowerment measurements and assessments of interventions. It provides a summary of an extensive literature review of women empowerment, entrepreneurship, and employment studies, and pulls upon lessons learnt from research conducted with a pilot initiative, Walmart’s Empowering Women Together program. It recognizes how the field has evolved beyond the scope of the literature to incorporate new actors, namely corporates, and new forms of interventions that introduce complexities of a global marketplace. The results bring to the fore: a need to move beyond the growth-focused business metrics found in entrepreneurship and women-employment studies; a need for find common metrics that can transcend economic-states (i.e. developing versus developed countries) and disciplinary-based approaches (i.e. development studies versus women studies versus business studies), and a need to rethink the ‘theory of change’ to capture empowerment as a process that unfolds over time with positive and backward steps. The Advisory Note is the last in a series of outputs coming out of the Walmart Empowering Women Together research project. There are also three case studies and one teaching case, all of which help to illustrate the reasons we questioned the advisability of certain current practices and measures. (Refer to the posted cases).

Clothing Poverty The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-hand Clothes

2015

Following the journey of a pair of jeans Clothing Poverty takes the reader on a vivid around-the-world tour from cotton fields to retail stores. Andrew Brooks shows how new and second-hand clothes are traded across continents and traces the human and environmental impacts of production and consumption. Using research from around the globe, colourful stories and hard data demonstrate how the clothing, textile and recycling sectors have played a major part in making different regions of the world rich and poor. Clothing Poverty uncovers how fast fashion retailers and charity shops are embroiled in commodity chains which perpetuate poverty. Stitching together rich narratives from Papua New Guinean tribal people, Mozambican cotton growers, Zambian factory workers, American jeans markets, international charities, Nigerian smugglers, London’s vintage clothing scene and Vivienne Westwood’s new ethical designer lines, Brooks uncovers the many secret sides of fashion.

Potentials - Design in the Field: New Discourse on Craft Development

Potentials – Design in the field is a process that started in 2005 when World Design research group members discussed about organizing a group exhibition that would discuss craft development and seek new ways to look and evaluate development processes. The goal of the project has been to promote local contribution in the area of social design. Research group members have been involved in ongoing projects in the area of craft and design development in different locations: Namibia, Finland, Indonesia and Colombia. Potentials – Design in the field project aims at disseminating information about craft development practices that have been tested and found successful for local income generation and adding value to local craft production through strategic design. There is a need for practice based research that can help in policy making and development work done with craft and design development work.