When Women Lead
Lessons on taking risks, generating breakthrough ideas, and scaling up from women leaders in the humanitarian sector
When it comes to gender inequality, developing nations often bear the brunt of the aid sector’s criticism. And while there’s a case to be made that donors don’t do nearly enough to support women’s rights around the world, aid and development groups have backed scores of programs aiming, for example, to boost the number of women in civil service, end child marriage or eradicate unequal health outcomes by gender.
But the aid and development sector’s own performance on gender inclusion often falls well short of the standards we expect from others.
The 73rd UN General Assembly was kicked off with its fourth-ever woman president. Two out of three international development organizations employ more men than women at the executive level. A shocking one out of five organizations don’t have any women at all in the C-Suite. And it’s not a problem of supply: Close to three-quarters of the people working in the global aid and development sector are women, according to the research group Quantum Impact.
As our first season of Displaced comes to a close, we want to highlight the women leaders who are forging ahead. They’ve given us a glimpse into the top levels of the humanitarian sector, sharing their insights on how to educate children in conflict zones, why analyzing state fragility can help us predict conflict (and what state fragility even means), the moral imperative to resettle refugees and what it takes to respond to global epidemics. Running through many of these conversations is the theme of innovation.
Kanika Bahl, the CEO of Evidence Action, described how her organization incubates, prototypes and evaluates development interventions to fight global poverty. Bahl and her team select promising prototypes from a slew of candidates, looking for ideas with the most potential to scale to the tune of hundreds of millions of people. Evidence Action’s school-based deworming initiative, for example, has reached over 275 million children in partnership with governments in India, Kenya, Ethiopia, Vietnam, and Nigeria. Deworming has been shown to improve school attendance, even among children who have not been treated.
Bahl echoed a theme voiced by Reshma Saujani, the CEO of the national nonprofit Girls Who Code: For innovation to succeed, the organization needs to constantly recalibrate the road to success based on dozens — if not hundreds — of incremental failures. That’s how Saujani was able to scale up Girls Who Code, which offers free and paid coding classes to girls, from serving 20 students in 2012 to reaching over 90,000 today.
DfID’s chief economist Rachel Glennerster had a different take on evaluating programs’ impact. Glennerster is a “randomista,” a proponent of using an evaluation tool called randomized controlled trials to debunk development myths and discover what actually brings results. We often hear folks in the aid sector trumpet “investment in women’s education is the most effective investment in development,” Glennerster told Grant and Ravi. “Actually, all they’re doing is pulling from correlations. There’s pretty much no evidence behind that statement.
“That’s not a very reliable way to make policy or make decisions.”
Bridging these threads is Alix Zwane, a development leader at the forefront of aid innovation for most of her career. Before becoming CEO of the Global Innovation Fund, an international impact investor with a $200 million endowment, Zwane’s research helped change the way the sector approached behavioral science. Her breakthrough, the chlorine dispenser, is at the heart of a multicountry Evidence Action campaign for clean drinking water to over 3 million people. Now at GIF, Zwane is providing early stage capital to innovative ideas tackling global poverty in fragile states.
The humanitarian sector is changing. Conflict is more entrenched, people are displaced for longer, climate change is blurring the line between man-made and ecological disasters, and poverty is growing harder to eradicate where it persists. Addressing these challenges requires innovative solutions, and it requires people who are willing to take risks— hard-nosed idealists like Bahl, Glennerster, Saujani and Zwane.
Season 1 ends on Oct 30th and we’re picking back up in January. Don’t miss the new season of Displaced: subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Art19 or wherever you get your podcasts.
Any questions, comments, or suggestions for the upcoming season? Drop us a note at displaced@rescue.org or comment below!
