Economic inclusion programs are already reaching tens of millions of women, yet too many of these initiatives treat women as beneficiaries rather than co‑designers of change. The Partnership for Economic Inclusion (PEI) has mapped over 400 economic inclusion programs in 88 countries, benefiting more than 70 million people; 90 percent target women, but only about one-third put women’s economic empowerment (WEE) at the core of their objectives.
The latest PEI Open House on “Designing for Empowerment: Economic Inclusion Programs for Women” and the new In Practice note Breaking Barriers: Empowering Women through Economic Inclusion Programs send a clear message: if programs do not explicitly design for women’s agency, resources, and context, they risk reinforcing the very inequalities they aim to address.
This is where participatory design thinking can fundamentally shift how governments, the World Bank, and partners design and deliver economic inclusion for women.
- From “Targeting Women” to “Designing with Women”
The PEI WEE framework structures empowerment around three interlinked pillars: agency (voice, aspirations, decision-making), resources (financial, human, social capital), and context (norms, institutions, care systems). Evidence from multiple countries shows that when programs deliberately integrate all three, women’s labor force participation and control over earnings rise substantially.
Yet, as highlighted in the PEI Open House:
- Most programs still focus primarily on resources (assets, training, cash), with less systematic attention to women’s agency and restrictive social norms.
- Gender-specific constraints like childcare, eldercare, safety, and mobility remain under-addressed in program design and delivery.
- Programs that do put WEE at their core are much more likely to include community sensitization, engaging men, and monitoring gender outcomes.
Participatory design thinking is a practical route to make this shift, from “women as targets” to “women as designers and decision‑makers in the program logic itself.”
- What Participatory Design Thinking Brings to WEE Programs
Participatory design thinking combines the tools of human‑centered design (HCD) with inclusive, power‑aware facilitation. For women’s economic inclusion, it has three distinctive strengths:
- Starts from women’s lived realities, not from a generic “beneficiary profile”.
Through co‑creation workshops, journey mapping, and community dialogues, design teams see how women actually navigate markets, care responsibilities, violence risks, mobility limits, and community expectations. - Makes invisible constraints visible.
In many PEI‑mapped programs, childcare, eldercare, and social norms are still the least-addressed dimensions, even though they strongly shape whether women can take up economic opportunities. Participatory methods surface these as design requirements, not side issues. - Builds ownership and reduces backlash.
When husbands, mothers‑in‑law, community leaders, and young men are deliberately engaged in co‑design, through couples’ dialogues, mixed‑group prototyping, or norm‑change sessions, support for women’s participation grows and conflict is reduced.
The gender‑transformative work described in PEI’s Open House, community sensitization in Kenya and Malawi, couples’ dialogue models, and structured women’s empowerment training, is already implicitly applying participatory design principles. The opportunity now is to make these approaches systematic, earlier in the design cycle, and tied to how programs define and measure success.
- What Women Tell Us When We Listen: Key Needs Emerging from the Field
Drawing on the PEI portfolio, the Breaking Barriers note, and lessons from programs in Kenya, Malawi, Bangladesh and beyond, several recurrent needs emerge when women and communities are placed at the center of analysis.
3.1 Care, time, and mobility
Women consistently report that care responsibilities and lack of time are decisive barriers to joining training, apprenticeships, or market activities. Yet childcare and eldercare are among the least common components in economic inclusion programs globally.
Participatory diagnosis in rural Kenya, for instance, has informed adaptations where training schedules are adjusted to market days, sessions are shortened, and group‑based enterprises are designed to allow rotation of care responsibilities rather than overloading individual women.
3.2 Safety, dignity, and social norms
In Malawi and other countries, women participating in graduation-style programs report fears of intimate partner violence, social backlash when they earn more than men, and restrictions on mobility (e.g., travelling to markets alone).
Programs that used couples’ dialogue and engaging‑men modules, as in Uganda’s WINGS and Concern Worldwide’s work in Malawi, show how facilitated conversations about gender roles, conflict resolution, and joint decision-making can reduce backlash and support sustained women’s economic participation.
3.3 Market opportunities that fit women’s realities
Women often express a desire to move beyond saturated, low‑return “female” sectors. But participatory market analysis reveals real constraints around skills, networks, norms, and safety in more profitable value chains.
Experiences from Kenya and Bangladesh show that when women are involved in selecting viable livelihoods and apprenticeships, rather than being assigned standard options, they choose activities that balance income potential with social acceptability and safety.
In Bangladesh, targeted apprenticeships for young women have been designed to open new occupational niches while addressing concerns about harassment, transport, and family approval, identified through community consultations and young women’s focus groups.
3.4 Coaching and peer support, not just one‑off training
Evidence from multiple PEI‑tracked programs indicates that coaching plus peer groups significantly enhance women’s ability to turn program inputs into sustainable livelihoods and to navigate intra-household power dynamics.
Participatory approaches have informed:
- Designing group coaching formats that encourage peer learning and collective problem‑solving (as in Uganda’s Graduating to Resilience).
- Involving family members in select sessions to reduce male backlash and increase joint planning (as in BOMA’s REAP in Kenya or Concern Worldwide’s programs in Malawi).
- From Needs to Solutions: How to Embed Participatory Design in Economic Inclusion
For World Bank and government task teams, the question is not whether to consult women but how to institutionalize participatory design thinking at each stage of economic inclusion programming, diagnostics, design, delivery, and monitoring.
A practical way is to map needs to design responses, using the WEE framework:
| Core need (from women’s lived experience) | Participatory design response | WEE pillar primarily strengthened |
| “I don’t have time; I am always caring for someone.” | Co‑design schedules; explore community‑run childcare/eldercare; prototype shared care solutions in groups. | Context / Resources[1][2][3] |
| “My husband/family may not allow me to participate.” | Facilitate couples’ dialogues; engage community leaders; co‑create messages with men and women; include men in specific modules. | Context / Agency[6][7][3] |
| “Training is far away and not safe.” | Map mobility patterns with women; adjust locations and timing; co-design safe transport options; integrate phones/digital tools if feasible. | Resources / Context[2][3] |
| “The businesses offered are not good for us.” | Conduct participatory market analysis; let women shortlist and test livelihood options; adapt asset packages accordingly. | Resources / Agency[2][5] |
| “I lack confidence and support to keep going.” | Co-design coaching formats; build peer groups; women’s empowerment training; integrate behavioural nudges; celebrate small wins. | Agency / Social resources[7][3] |
Below is a suggested step‑by‑step approach that World Bank teams can adapt and embed in their country operations.
- A Four‑Step Participatory Design Process for WEE‑Focused Programs
Step 1: Start with participatory, gender‑sensitive assessments
The Breaking Barriers note recommends thorough assessments of the multiple, intersecting constraints women face, limited access to resources, care burdens, mobility constraints, and restrictive norms.[3][1][2]
To make this genuinely empowering:
- Use mixed methods: combine survey data with participatory tools, daily time‑use mapping, mobility mapping, safety walks, and problem‑tree exercises with different groups of women (young, older, marital status, disability status).
- Engage men and community leaders early: structured dialogues to understand their perceptions and potential resistance surfaces risks before design is locked in.
- Segment by life stage and context: young women seeking apprenticeships, mothers of small children, widows, and older women often face different constraints and opportunities.[3][2]
Deliverable for task teams: a WEE constraint map that clearly identifies which barriers are structural (laws, services), which are social (norms, power), and which are individual (skills, aspirations), and where economic inclusion instruments can realistically act.
Step 2: Co‑design program packages around agency, resources, and context
Rather than selecting a standard “toolkit” and then adding “gender components,” participatory design starts by asking: What mix of support would women themselves prioritize if they had a voice in the design?
Using co‑creation workshops with women, men, and local implementers, teams can:
- Design agency‑building components:
- Contextualize life‑skills and empowerment training content with women’s own stories and aspirations.
- Prototype coaching scripts that address local norms, violence, and intra‑household bargaining, not just enterprise management.
- Shape resource packages that fit women’s realities:
- Co-create livelihood “menus” rather than pre‑packaged options.
- Combine productive assets, savings groups, and financial literacy with women‑driven choices of sectors and business models.
- Adapt to context and norms, not work around them:
- Co-design community sensitization campaigns and couple sessions.
- Use audio‑visual tools developed with local women and men, as highlighted in the PEI framing presentation, to make life‑skills and norm‑change content more accessible.
In countries like Kenya and Malawi, PEI‑associated programs have used such approaches to integrate community sensitization, women’s empowerment curricula, and couple dialogues directly into program design, rather than treating them as optional add‑ons.
Step 3: Prototype, test, and iterate delivery models with users
Design thinking emphasizes rapid prototyping and iteration. For large‑scale government programs this can be politically and operationally challenging, but still feasible through:
- Pilot cohorts where alternative delivery options are tested: group vs individual coaching, different training schedules, or varied involvement of spouses. Evidence from Uganda and Kenya suggests group coaching can achieve similar impact to individual coaching at lower cost, while still being acceptable to women and their families when co‑designed with them.
- User feedback loops: short, structured feedback sessions after each training module or coaching cycle.
- Participatory M&E tools: women’s scorecards, reflection circles, and community review meetings to assess safety, respect, and relevance, not just economic outputs.
The aim is to treat women not just as “subjects” of monitoring, but as co‑interpreters of results who help adjust content and processes.
Step 4: Measure what matters to women, and report back
PEI’s work emphasizes the importance of measuring WEE outcomes, not only income, but also control over earnings, decision‑making, and time use.
Participatory design thinking strengthens this by:
- Involving women in defining what “empowerment” looks like locally (e.g., being able to travel alone to the market, deciding on children’s schooling, or refusing unsafe work).
- Integrating qualitative indicators and stories of change into program dashboards.
- Reporting back findings to communities in accessible formats, closing the feedback loop and reinforcing accountability.
- Policy Directions: What the World Bank and Partners Can Do Next
To move from isolated good practice to systemic change, three levels of action are critical: program, policy, and ecosystem.
6.1 Program level: Make participatory design a non‑negotiable
- Build participatory design phases and budgets into World Bank–financed operations and government‑led programs from the outset, not as “social mobilization” after design.
- Require that economic inclusion projects that claim a WEE objective explicitly demonstrate how women and marginalised groups participated in diagnostics, option design, and M&E.
- Invest in local facilitation capacity, coaches, community workers, and women leaders trained in gender‑transformative, participatory methods, not just in technical training.
6.2 Policy level: Align design thinking with structural reforms
Participatory design at the micro level cannot substitute for structural reforms. The Breaking Barriers note highlights the need to pair program adaptations with advocacy for gender‑equality reforms, public childcare and eldercare, removal of legal barriers to women’s work and asset ownerhip, and improved access to finance.
Insights from participatory processes can feed directly into this policy agenda:
- Evidence of unmet childcare needs can support arguments for public investment in care infrastructure.
- Documented experiences of mobility restrictions and harassment can inform transport and safety policies.
- Women’s preferences for certain value chains can guide sector strategies and skills development policy.
6.3 Ecosystem level: Normalize learning with and from women
Finally, participatory design thinking should shape how knowledge itself is produced and shared:
- Platforms like the PEI Open House series and the In Practice briefs can increasingly feature women participants, coaches, and local facilitators as co‑presenters, not only technical experts and policymakers.
- The PEI Data Portal and State of Economic Inclusion Reports can include fields and case studies documenting which participatory methods were used and what changed because of them.[9][10][11][5]
- Development partners and NGOs can co‑create regional communities of practice around participatory, gender‑transformative economic inclusion, ensuring that learning from Kenya, Malawi, Bangladesh, and elsewhere circulates and adapts.
- Conclusion: Designing with Women Is the New Baseline
The emerging evidence is encouraging: when economic inclusion programs intentionally address women’s agency, resources, and context, and when they integrate components such as community sensitization, empowerment training, couple dialogues, and targeted apprenticeships, women’s economic participation and decision‑making power rise measurably.
But to reach their full potential, these programs must go beyond targeting women to sharing power with women in how problems are defined, solutions are chosen, and success is measured. Participatory design thinking offers a concrete, scalable way to do this, even in large, government‑led systems.
For policymakers, practitioners, and World Bank teams, the next generation of economic inclusion programs for women should adopt a simple test:
Were women present and heard at every major design decision, diagnostics, program package, delivery model, and M&E, and can we show how their input changed what we did?
If the answer is yes, we are not only designing for empowerment. We are designing with empowerment, laying the groundwork for more inclusive economies where women’s voices are central to the policies that shape their lives.
Further reading and viewing
- PEI Open House webinar on Economic Inclusion Programs for Women (recording and materials).
- Breaking Barriers: Empowering Women through Economic Inclusion Programs (In Practice note).
- PEI’s State of Economic Inclusion reports and Data Portal for global program design trends.
Text supported by AI.