South Asia is home to one-seventh of the world's population. A little less than one-third of these people live in poverty, making this region, only second to sub-Saharan Africa, as the poorest in the world. With about half of these poor people being women, and given their life situation, it becomes imperative to focus on women’s empowerment.
South Asia has the widest gender gap in economic participation and opportunity worldwide. South Asian women lag behind their peers in access to jobs, equitable wages and entrepreneurship.
Furthermore, to achieve the global goals of gender equality (SDG 5), poverty alleviation (SDG 1), productive employment (SDG 8), and reduced inequality within and among countries (SDG 10), improvement in the economic participation of South Asian women is a necessary condition. In South Asia, most women are in unskilled, informal, and in unpaid occupations across economic sectors. Entrepreneurs, typically home-based workers, are first-generation – diversifying from agriculture - and necessity-driven. The barriers of fewer external networks, and limited access to market, knowledge, and capital, limit the growth of their firms, which remain small in terms of employees, revenue, and profit. In addition, the social constructs and gender norms, disempower and disadvantage their economic participation.
Despite this shared challenge of the region, there is limited effort to use the collective imagination and experience of countries to tackle the common problem. The shared cultural values, similar gender norms, barriers, and similarities in how informal markets operate in South Asia strengthen the rationale for a collective lens to the problem. Sharing knowledge, resources, networks, and people-to-people connections would help women entrepreneurs to gain newer markets, an understanding of best practices, and increased self-confidence, from a regional identity. In turn, this has the potential to contribute to regional economic integration, if the complex political economy can be navigated.
In 2011, Business, Enterprise and Employment Support for Women in South Asia Network (Guarantee) Limited, an informal platform of 15 civil society organizations representing 8 South Asian countries was born as a regional platform to collectively tackle the shared challenge of women’s economic participation. With the support of the World Bank, the BEES Network primary focus over the last decade was on delivering peer learning between women entrepreneurs and grassroots producers across borders. The platform leveraged its strengths of scale and scope, with the scale of the BEES Network being the combined strength of its individual members at about 23 million women, and the geographical reach including cross-learning through best practices on entrepreneurship, reaching remote areas covered by BEES Network members. The scope refers to the diversity of its member organizations in terms of their capabilities – deep knowledge of gender-based discrimination to e-commerce - and constituencies – from home-based workers to artisanal clusters, ensured that the platform was more than a sum of its parts. The BEES could tackle the challenge of economic participation with the complexity and nuance it demanded.
By 2022, the BEES Network had gone through a decade of learning by doing; both, about the landscape and the platform itself. The time was apt for the collective to take stock and make strategic choices about its future. Over the year, the BEES Network, with the support of the World Bank, a strategic partner, invested in an exercise that looked back at its learning; put the collective imagination to words in terms of vision, mission, and goals; sketched out its theory of change; and translated it all into a strategic plan. The process, facilitated by an external consultancy firm, consisted of workshops, retreats, small group discussions, and stakeholder interviews. This document captures the outcomes of this exercise.