Women Win: Study of a Holistic Approach to Girls’ Empowerment

Abstract

Women’s empowerment has become a central subject to international development, as many organizations focus on empowering adolescent girls and young women, especially through engagement in sports. Surprisingly, the enterprises of international development has limited connections with academic research, and seems to have developed its own body of literature. Women Win is a non-profit organization for the empowerment of girls through sports, that is funded by Standard Chartered Bank to disseminate their Goal Program across the globe. Standard Chartered makes investments for economic development in accordance with their framework of eight elements, which are enablers of economic empowerment for girls in developing countries. This study employed t-tests to assess program effectiveness and multiple regression tests to assess how improvement in these elements via the Goal Program predicted girls’ economic empowerment, in order to test the effectiveness of a holistic approach to economic empowerment, where multiple aspects of girls’ lives are targeted for improvement simultaneously. 4,610 adolescent girls from the ages of 12 to 18 (mean age = 14.09) were investigated. Results showed that empowerment in the domains of sexual and reproductive health and rights, role models and support networks, and gender-based violence were all positively related to each other, and they all positively predicted economic empowerment, confirming the effectiveness of a holistic approach. some of the reasons for the lack of collaboration between international development business and academic research from each other, and the ways through which these fields can work together are discussed.