The private sector: an ally in the fight against GBV in agriculture?
- Partner: Feed the Future Advancing Women’s Empowerment (AWE) program consortium, USAID
- Publication Type: Blog Post
- Date: October 2019
- Team: Erin Markel, Julia Hakspiel
- Recommended Citation: Markel, Erin; Hakspiel, Julia (2019 October). The private sector: an ally in the fight against GBV in agriculture? [Blog]. Agrilinks/Feed the Future Advancing Women’s Empowerment (AWE) Program.
The economic costs of gender-based violence (GBV) are immense and preventing and mitigating GBV saves money. For businesses, costs associated with GBV include absenteeism, loss of productivity, and time spent outside of work at court or participating in services for survivors. Given the individual, business, and economic costs of GBV, engaging the private sector is important from both a “do no harm” perspective and to increase our ability to achieve program outcomes.
Building on MSA’s experience as a leading member of the Feed the Future Advancing Women’s Empowerment (AWE) consortium, this blog post unpacks the potential benefits and risks of engaging the private sector in addressing GBV. The MSA team also shares promising examples of development sector and private sector partnerships in Egypt and Sierra Leone and looks to what’s next for partnering with the private sector in market systems and agricultural programming.
