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Through a Local Lens: Institutionalizing Gender Equality
November 2023
To scale impact, Engendering Industries embeds gender equality trainings at partner institutions worldwide.
As Engendering Industries Director of Change Management and Inclusion, Jasmine Boehm, says, “It’s easy to get one person to take 2,000 steps, but it’s hard to get 2,000 people to take a single step at the exact same time.”
USAID’s Engendering Industries program supports companies in male-dominated industries to take a unified step towards gender equality. The program’s unique approach has been used with 67 companies across 30 countries, with tangible results. With support from Engendering Industries, partners have hired or promoted over 8,400 women since 2020, and 43% assert that business performance has improved as gender equality increased at their organization.
Despite significant gains made by program partners, gender inequality remains an outsized problem that could be sapping the global economy of $12-24 trillion. To scale its reach, Engendering Industries embedded a gender equality training program at renowned academic and training institutions worldwide, making the program’s methodology and resources more widely available and adaptable for local contexts. Institutional partners now independently provide gender equality trainings and the associated coaching as part of their standard course offerings.
USAID prioritizes locally-led development by directly supporting local people, institutions, organizations, private entities, and the government, which leads to greater results.
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Adapting Gender Equality Trainings to Strengthen Companies
Lagos Business School in Nigeria, Kenya Electricity Generation Company (KenGen), and Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia now offer the Engendering Industries Gender Equality Training Course. Institutional partners trained employees from 85 companies between August 2021 and July 2023.
“Our mandate is to create responsible leaders for Nigeria and Africa, and I’m quite excited about Engendering Industries and the perspective that it can bring to our business environment,” says Dr. Olayinka David-West, a training facilitator and Associate Dean and Professor of Information Systems at Lagos Business School. “In the past, we have run a women-in-leadership program, but Engendering Industries gives you tools to look at gender equality from a systemic perspective rather than just an individual perspective.”
Partnering with these institutions worldwide has helped Engendering Industries widen its reach, particularly because local ownership by partner institutions enabled a contextualization that deepens the program’s impact. Each institutional training and academic partner is recognized as an influential leader in their space. KenGen, for example, is one of the top geothermal energy producers globally, and their technical trainings are respected across Africa.
“Being the market leader, people really look up to KenGen, the brand we’ve built and the projects we undertake,” says Catherine Leech, Geochemist and Engendering Industries Training Manager and facilitator at KenGen. “We’ve already established trust so that, whatever we bring to the table in terms of courses, they take it and know that it’s from KenGen and it’s a really good thing.”
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"Our mandate is to create responsible leaders for Nigeria and Africa, and I’m quite excited about Engendering Industries and the perspective that it can bring to our business environment."
– Dr. Olayinka David-West, training facilitator and Associate Dean and Professor of Information Systems at Lagos Business School
In addition to leveraging their local reputations, each partner has also tailored the Engendering Industries course materials to fit their local needs, adjusting course timelines, adding regional case studies, and bringing the nuanced perspectives of their experienced facilitators.
Training facilitator, Nathalia Franco Borrero, Director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Development Studies at Universidad de Los Andes, notes the impact the course can have when several industry players participate in the course at the same time and commit to advance gender equality in their industry.
“If you have a complete industry or at least five or six companies in an industry who are all developing a gender policy at the same time, that will change minds in the industry and shift how everyone is recruiting people and treating their employees,” explains Borrero. The University has started to plan a course for a cohort from the Colombian navy.
Engendering Industries will continue to provide technical support to partner institutions, helping partners monitor results, facilitate cross-institutional learning, and refine the program over time to continue to suit local needs. With each institution offering the course at a steady cadence, more organizations than ever before will be able to take the first step on their gender equality journey, using the Engendering Industries approach.