Areas of Expertise

Integrating issues of gender and inclusivity of marginalized communities is significant to sustainable economic development. IDG takes a Gender-Conscious Approach that reflects the USAID 2020 Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Policy vision. This Policy vision highlights that women may be underemployed, employed in the informal economy, experience workplace harassment, and face discrimination and other barriers to achieving the same titles and assets as their male counterparts.

IDG understands and emphasizes that as more women face fewer barriers to entitlements and endowment access, the greater the market-wide impacts. Additionally, we study specific local contexts to understand how not only women, but different marginalized communities such as LGBTI people, disabled individuals, and ethnic minority groups. Inclusive economic empowerment is a major indicator of poverty reduction. Some of the ways IDG incorporates economic gender and inclusivity are:

• Assisting women in accessing property by working with lenders to shift from collateral-based lending to risk-based lending using credit scores since women may face more obstacles to property access
• Working to reform labor laws
• Aiding in developing workplace policies to account for benefits and flexible work hours to accommodate for other priorities
• Conducting Cost-Benefit Analyses
• Breaking down the way public expenditure benefits populations by gender to determine if investment is impacting genders differently
• Helping microfinance institutions and non-traditional lenders assist borrowers and offer financial services to SMEs in the supply chain