Co-authored by Wendy Chamberlin (Senior Advisor, Climate and Market Linkages, Trickle Up) and Niyati Singaraju (Postdoctoral Fellow, Gender Research, International Rice Research Institute)

This is the second of a three part blog series on digital agency.

In the development community, there is growing recognition that digital tools can help individuals, especially women, and households build resilience in the face of shocks and stresses. At the same time, agency—a person’s ability to define and pursue their own goals—is essential. In development we tend to approach solution design in silos, and as such, there has been little effort to date to consider the importance of digital agency for women as a priority. But without agency, a woman may be unable to use the numerous digital tools that would help grow her livelihood and support her needs and aspirations. 

Digital agency combines a focus on digital access and usage with agency. It prioritizes ensuring that individuals, especially women who participate in Trickle Up’s economic inclusion programs, can access, use, and have control over the digital products and platforms they require to support their needs and to help them to achieve their goals on the road to individual resilience. 

In practice, this means meeting women where they already engage digitally—on platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook—and recognizing that they may not be looking for a single app to solve their challenges. Instead, they may rely on advice and ideas from their social networks to improve their livelihoods or increase their profitability. 

No One Entity Can Solve for Digital Agency

Trickle Up isn’t the only one thinking about digital agency, and that’s a good thing.

In early October, Trickle Up was pleased to partner with the CGIAR Gender Equality and Inclusion Accelerator in hosting a workshop on digital agency at their Gender in Food, Land, and Water Systems Conference 2025 to begin to define and understand how women experience digital agency. This workshop included representatives from the World Bank, IFPRI, ID Insight, and BRAC Global, to name a few. The purpose of this workshop was to answer: what needs to be considered when understanding women’s digital agency?

Answering this proved to be difficult. Conversations on digital anything tend to skew to one sectoral bent or another. Yet, in this case, we forced ourselves to understand why exactly this topic matters through the perspectives of various stakeholders. Here are some of the dimensions of digital agency our group discussed: 

• Demographic Prioritization: Recognizing the unique needs of different groups, especially women 

• Aspirations: Understanding and aligning with individuals’ goals and motivations

• Access & Affordability: Ensuring digital tools and platforms are reachable and financially accessible

• Safeguarding & Ethics: Protecting users’ rights, privacy, and safety in digital environments

• Policy & Regulatory Support: Creating enabling environments through inclusive policies and frameworks

• Data Quality & Gaps: Addressing missing or unreliable data that affects decision-making and inclusion

• Fit-for-Purpose Solutions: Designing tools that are relevant, usable, and context-sensitive

• Access to Capital, Markets & Information: Expanding opportunities through digital channels

These features may sound obvious, but often in the hype of digital solutions there is an overt focus on what the digital solutions can do, rather than on what truly enables women to benefit from it. This is where collaboration and shared learning—like our discussion with CGIAR—become so important.

What’s in It for Others: A Perspective from CGIAR 

For CGIAR, the discussion helped shift the focus beyond access toward what truly builds women’s digital agency: trust, accountability, and the systems that make digital spaces safe and empowering. The conversation reinforced that inclusion isn’t an end in itself, but a pathway for women and socially excluded groups to act, decide, and lead within digital ecosystems. Exploring this through individual, meso, and meta levels also opened new ways to think about how research and partnerships can make that possible.

These insights reinforce that digital agency can’t be advanced by one actor alone—it takes shared vision, aligned priorities, and collective action.

What Gets Prioritized Gets Done 

To support digital agency for vulnerable women, there needs to be an intentional focus on what it looks like. No one entity can solve for digital agency. Trickle Up, for example, recognizes the importance of policy and regulation—and while it has limited experience in pursuing this directly, it can advocate for its importance in its work with government stakeholders. Similarly, CGIAR cannot single-handedly develop digital solutions, but it can work with its researchers and fellow implementing organizations to design and support solutions that will help build up the digital agency of rural women.

Moving Forward

In the near future, Trickle Up and CARE are joining together and plan to co-create and test a set of indicators that are reflective of the elements of digital agency we have shared above. Additionally, because this effort will only be successful with diverse input and perspective, our aim is to continue creating a learning collaborative with stakeholders from across sectors where we can see if these indicators are relevant to measuring women’s digital agency. This will inform us about what must change in our programmatic approaches to better support the digital agency of women in future efforts. 

True progress will come not from isolated innovation, but from collective commitment to ensuring that digital spaces are places where women can act, decide, and lead.

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