Resilient Markets: Strengthening Women’s Economic Empowerment and Market Systems in Fragile Settings

This briefing paper outlines CARE’s initial thinking on fostering economic empowerment for women and the resilience of market systems in fragile contexts. It concludes with intervention areas that show promise, and working recommendations for a range of actors active in and working on markets before, during and after crisis.

The paper recommends that all actors should be using the three A’s framework (anticipate, absorb and adapt) as well as a broad understanding of the market system as a whole to target and link interventions across a crisis and through multiple actors. Further recommendations include:

1. Anticipate:
   • Large actors must underwrite the risk with smaller parts of a market system, and should take on responsibility for investing in preventative capacity, including leveraging technology to improve access to information and scenario planning.
2. Absorb:
   • Humanitarian actors should support cash programming accompanied by a deliberate gender transformation strategy and continue to gather data to see how cash translates into greater empowerment.
   • Firms should seek to generate positive social impacts in fragile contexts including examining how their business practices can contribute to building cohesion and stability.
3. Adapt:
   • Prosperity and economic development strategies should be focused at both the macro and the micro levels, with approaches that seek to address fragility and risk through investment in formal and informal economies in productive sectors.
   • Humanitarian actors, the private sector and donors should act deliberately to support more equal roles for women through longer term support to their businesses and livelihoods, as well as providing platforms to translate economic empowerment into political leadership and decision-making.
   • Political and business leaders should do more to value the economic and social contribution of refugees.