This learning brief has been developed to illuminate lessons that could be drawn out from the Afghanistan Business Innovation Fund (ABIF), particularly concerning how gender considerations played out within the context of a pilot M4P-focused (making markets work for the poor) challenge fund in an untested market. Now that ABIF has finished, we are able to identify several important considerations that were observed, discuss challenges that women-owned businesses faced in accessing ABIF funding and also how ABIF grantees were able to deliver benefits to female beneficiaries in their target sectors.
To our knowledge, ABIF is one of the first M4P-focused programmes in Afghanistan. Most private sector development projects in Afghanistan have concentrated on the broader development of medium, small and micro enterprises (MSMEs) and value chains. This seems particularly true for projects designed to enhance women’s participation in handicrafts, small-scale horticulture/ livestock or agri-processing sectors. Such projects typically implement change via a direct intervention approach, while M4P projects adopt a facilitation role that typically supports market change through cooperation with permanent markets players.
Many M4P projects, including enterprise challenge funds, are still ‘trying and testing’ the best ways to integrate a gender perspective and facilitate women’s economic empowerment. In this learning brief, we highlight how the mechanisms employed by ABIF enabled the Afghan private sector to impact women – in both traditional and culturally-acceptable ways, but also in ways that enhance women’s professional growth and economic empowerment – under the auspices of market-led commercial investments that were incentivised by donor grants. We also reflect on how future programmes in this context might capitalise on this learning and adopt a more explicit gender focus in future by reviewing some of the challenges that women-owned businesses faced in accessing ABIF funding.