Ready to Bloom?

• Author: Mark Blackden and Mary Hallward-Driemeier
• Position: an independent consultant working on gender issues in development, and is a Lead Economist in the office of the World Bank Chief Economist.

Tanzanian businesswoman Dina Bina has been running and promoting Dina Flowers Company Ltd. for over a decade. She emphasizes customer care: “You should go out of your way to do something extra.” It paid off for her when she was offered a contract to help do the landscaping at Dar es Salaam International Airport. When her husband, Mwita Bina, saw how the company was thriving, he left his own job to join Dina Flowers and is now its chief financial officer. “We went into the flower business because of Dina,” he says. “She noticed an opportunity, because there were hardly any florists in town.” Mwita’s salary provided the start-up capital for Dina Flowers. Of his wife’s success, Mwita says, “I suspect there are a lot of men who would be threatened. But I am not one of those. For us it’s worked well in that we really complement each other.”

As the story of Dina Flowers (Cutura, 2007) illustrates, women’s success in business depends on the convergence of many factors, including a market opportunity, adequate financing, entrepreneurial and technical skills, and networking. These matter for men’s businesses too, but evidence shows that women often face greater obstacles in accessing them. And, especially for women, family support can be critical. In fact in several countries, husbands can legally deny their wives permission to work, sign a contract, or even open a bank account.Â

Two recent World Bank studies focusing on women’s economic opportunities in sub-Saharan Africa examine where women and men work, how women’s businesses perform compared with men’s, and the economic and legal obstacles women must overcome if they are to expand their economic and entrepreneurial activity (Hallward-Driemeier and Hasan, 2013; Hallward-Driemeier, 2013).Â

These studies find that gender gaps in economic opportunity in the region stem less from whether or not women work than from differences in the types of activities women and men pursue. Women are much more likely to work in the informal sector, in smaller enterprises, and in traditional industries such as garment making and food preparation—all of which tend to pay lower returns. Expanding women’s economic empowerment is about enabling more women to operate in activities that offer higher returns. This requires addressing constraints on women’s access to assets, expanding women’s financial and managerial training, and involving more women in the policymaking environment.Â

Women in sub-Saharan Africa work. Few can afford not to. Nationally representative labor force and household survey data from over 100 low- and middle-income countries show that women’s labor force participation rates are higher in sub-Saharan Africa than in any other region (see Chart 1).Â

In sub-Saharan Africa, women are particularly active as entrepreneurs. However, they are disproportionately self-employed. Women make up 40 percent of the region’s nonagricultural labor force, but account for nearly 50 percent of the self-employed (see Chart 2)—the highest share in any region. By contrast, women represent only one-fourth of the region’s employers, a share that does not change much with a country’s level of development and is mirrored in all other regions except the Middle East and North Africa, where there are even fewer women employers, about 12 percent. In general, as a country’s income increases, women’s...