Lessons from New Evidence on Social Protection and Economic Inclusion

By Margherita di Clemente and Maja Gavrilović

In Graduation and economic inclusion programs, success is often measured through increases in income, assets, or savings. These gains matter, but evidence increasingly shows that economic progress alone does not automatically translate into empowerment.

Building on Naila Kabeer’s seminal framework, women’s empowerment requires shifts in progress across three interconnected dimensions: access to and control over resources (such as income, assets, or time); agency (the ability to set goals, make decisions, negotiate, and imagine alternative futures); and achievements (the outcomes that result when women are able to exercise agency using available resources).

When these dimensions do not shift as one, empowerment remains incomplete. A woman may receive a productive asset but remain unable to use it without permission. She may complete training but still lacks the time, mobility, or confidence to make economic decisions and act. She may save more money yet has no voice in how that money is spent at home.

In these cases, economic gains are real, but fragile. More durable and meaningful change tends to emerge when economic inputs are combined with intentional efforts to strengthen agency, expand collective voice and spaces, and reduce the social and care-related barriers that constrain women’s choices. Without these elements, women may advance economically but still encounter ceilings they cannot break on their own.

At Trickle Up, we have partnered with more than 485,000 women living in extreme poverty, many of whom live in rural environments. We understand economic empowerment as a multidimensional process, reflected not only in income or asset ownership, but also in changes in self-efficacy, confidence, and autonomy. This perspective shapes how we interpret emerging evidence, and how we design programs that seek not only to raise incomes, but to expand women’s real choices.

The Scoping Paper on Complementary Social Protection and Economic Inclusion Programming for Rural Women’s Economic Empowerment—commissioned by the STAAR Facility and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and developed with DAI Global UK Ltd and Oxford Policy Management—offers one of the most comprehensive syntheses to date on how rural women experience and benefit from economic inclusion programs. Key insights from Maja Gavrilović, lead author of the paper, explain where empowerment begins, how it grows, and what limits its progress:

Internal Shifts Matter

Empowerment often begins with internal changes before it appears in economic outcomes. Across economic inclusion programs, women frequently report early improvements in self-confidence, aspirations, and psychological well-being. These shifts can influence how women make decisions, approach risk, and envision their future, with important spillovers in economic progress.

In this sense, agency plays an important enabling role in women’s economic empowerment, even when income gains or enterprise growth take longer to materialize. Coaching and psychosocial support contribute to these processes. Coaching is not only a channel for delivering training or personalized support with business development, it can help reinforce women’s confidence and motivation to work towards their economic goals, communication skills, and capacity to overcome obstacles. Programs that include regular, relational support have shown value in helping participants apply new skills and navigate constraints, particularly in environments where gender norms, mobility restrictions, or household dynamics limit women’s choices and economic opportunities.

Program Design for the Most Vulnerable

How economic inclusion services are designed, accessed, and administered can determine whether women are able to participate at all and benefit. Procedural barriers such as documentation requirements, complex registration systems, digital interfaces, or payment modalities can disproportionately exclude the most vulnerable participants. Instead, when delivery systems are accessible, user-friendly, and adapted to women’s realities, participation and inclusion improve.

Evidence also shows that multidimensional approaches are often more effective than single-component interventions. Combining consumption support, skills training, financial inclusion mechanisms, productive inputs, and coaching can help address the multiple constraints women face simultaneously. These layered interventions reflect the complexity of women’s economic lives and the interconnected nature of the barriers they confront.

No Universal “Best Package”

There is no single “best package” of interventions: the most effective combinations depend on women’s constraints, opportunities, implementation capacity, and context. While multidimensional approaches are often beneficial, simpler bundles can produce similar results for some economic outcomes—particularly income and assets. Long-term empowerment outcomes remain under-studied, and available evidence suggests that sustained change in agency and gender norms may require longer exposure, booster activities, and carefully designed gender-transformative elements.

At the same time, digital delivery systems present both opportunities and risks. While they can enhance privacy and control over resources, they may exclude women without phones, literacy, or identification unless accompanied by targeted support such as digital and financial literacy training, ID access, and grievance mechanisms.

Addressing Structural Barriers

Despite program progress, persistent constraints such as limited mobility, heavy care responsibilities, weak market linkages, and restrictive gender norms continue to shape how far women can advance economically. Women’s and girls’ disproportionate responsibilities for childcare and domestic work remain one of the main structural barriers limiting program impact and women’s ability to fully benefit from economic inclusion initiatives. Even when agency and livelihoods improve, these structural factors can limit the scale and sustainability of gains unless accompanied by complementary investments in childcare and eldercare, transport, and gender-responsive delivery systems.

Without this broader support, improvements in income or skills risk remaining fragile and unevenly distributed.

What It Means to Trickle Up

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for women’s economic empowerment. What works varies by context: evidence shows that local markets, gender norms, geography, ethnic and social identities, and the availability of public services all shape the potential for women’s economic empowerment outcomes. This is why rigorous diagnostics and gender analysis are essential, to identify women’s most binding constraints and adapt program design and delivery accordingly.

Empowerment is not a linear or uniform process; it is cumulative and deeply context dependent. For Trickle Up, these findings reinforce a core lesson: economic inclusion must be designed as more than a pathway to higher income. It must also be a pathway to greater agency, stronger voice, and more resilient systems of support.

True empowerment does not emerge from economic progress alone. It grows when women can translate resources into choices, when social and care barriers are reduced, and when institutions evolve to better serve those who have long been excluded. Designing programs this way is not only more equitable and just—it is also more effective. When women are able to act on new opportunities, economic gains become more durable, and progress becomes more likely to endure beyond the life of any single program.

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