When Access Meets Agency: The Future of Women’s Digital Empowerment
This article was originally published by Trickle Up.
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.