No matter where you are in a project’s life cycle, we can assist. 

Our team of experts aims to help you gain clarity on your gender and social inclusion journey. We focus on closing the gender and inclusion gap in 7 focus areas:

  • Entrepreneurship

  • Access to Finance

  • Leadership and Voice

  • Employment and Skills

  • Gender-Based Violence

  • Livelihoods and Productivity

  • Community Engagement

Entrepreneurship

Women entrepreneurs represent about one in three growth-oriented entrepreneurs active in the world today, making them fundamental to promoting inclusive economic growth in developing economies.

Moreover, women can be important actors in scaling up key infrastructures such as off-grid solar or sanitation in hard-to-reach communities. Focusing on female entrepreneurship can also enhance financial performance, improve product design, foster greater innovation, and create safer work environments.  Interventions needed to foster female entrepreneurship can include, amongst others, enhancing access to capital, links to networks and information, and provision of business and soft skills training. Other social identities such as race, religion, citizenship, and disability often intersect to marginalize specific individuals in the sector even further.

Distill Inclusion can assist you in not only mapping the drivers behind the gender and social inclusion gaps related to entrepreneurship and productivity but also help you develop approaches that support and enable diverse entrepreneurs to thrive in the infrastructure sector.

Access to Finance

Access to finance plays a key role in assisting people build better lives for themselves, and for entrepreneurs to scale their operations and revenue.

Women and minority groups often encounter a variety of unique barriers to accessing finance. In some cases, women may be legally restricted from entering into contracts in their own name, or lack necessary documentation such as national IDs or passports. Financial service providers, may have a limited understanding of the bankability and preferences of certain potential target segments.

Distill Inclusion focuses on understanding the financing needs and constraints as perceived and experienced by women and minority groups, both as entrepreneurs as well as household members This is key to gaining insights on how people can purchase technologies and time-saving appliances, to grow their enterprises and improve their lives. Distill Inclusion can also help financial service providers and investors unleash significant economic opportunities while realizing empowerment goals by incorporating more inclusive actions in their portfolios and programs.

Leadership and Voice

Focusing on leadership and voice is fundamental to empowering any group that is disadvantaged based on their identity.

This is because people in decision-making positions have the power to voice their preferences, views, and interests, allocate resources, and exercise influence on legislative procedures. Being able to shape and impact policies is key to rectifying inequalities, and therefore paying attention to who has a seat at the table is critical.

At the workplace, less homogenous leadership leads to more innovation, better risk management, and greater financial performance. However, women still lag behind in leadership roles on company boards, key cabinet positions, or in management across the infrastructure sector.

Distill Inclusion can help you examine and identify the blockers that exist in your organization that result in a homogenous leadership team and leverage the multitude of benefits that diversity in leadership brings.

Employment and Skills

Global GDP could rise significantly if women participated in the economy at the same rate as men.

Yet women are still under-represented in the infrastructure sectors, and interventions and investments to address gender gaps in the infrastructure sector remain minimal. Women face numerous systemic barriers across their careers in recruitment, retention, and promotion. The organizational culture in male-dominated sectors creates further difficulties, as do inadequate facilities such as e.g. toilets, accommodation, safe transport and child-care. Other social identities such as race, religion, citizenship, and disability often intersect to marginalize specific individuals in the sector even further.

Distill Inclusion can access and identify the areas where barriers to entry occur and provide practical steps for you to take to begin the process of enhancing equity in employment and skills development.

Gender-Based Violence

The root cause of gender-based violence (GBV) is gender inequality and social injustice. Anyone can experience GBV, regardless of their geographical location, socio-economic background, race, religion, sexuality, or gender identity; however, some forms of GBV are mostly experienced by women and girls.

For infrastructure stakeholders, it is key to be proactive in mitigating and responding to GBV, especially when there is a significant labor influx, high existing prevalence of GBV, limited laws and policies on GBV, and limited support services for survivors. Forms of GBV that occur in the workplace and on-site in the infrastructure sector include, amongst others, sexual harassment, sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA), and domestic violence.

The Distill Inclusion team has in-depth sector experience working at infrastructure project sites and within institutions to help identify risks and opportunities around mitigating and responding to GBV. We partner closely with you to assess issues, implement action and integrate innovative measures that can assist you in addressing GBV and supporting survivors.

Livelihoods and Productivity

Having access to working and reliable infrastructure is a key determinant of people’s well-being. It is also a basic requirement for businesses to prosper. Investments in new infrastructure and technologies should aim to enhance livelihoods and increase productivity for all.

Entrepreneurs of various sizes can, through enhanced infrastructure investments, generate new job opportunities and income in the short and long term. However, underlying gender gaps such as access to assets, agricultural input, transport, and information, often hinder women’s ability to access and reap the full benefits of the investments made in improving water, energy or transportation. It is therefore vital to consider different social roles and needs of women and men to ensure equal opportunities, reduce safety risks and improve the quality of women’s lives in general.

Distill Inclusion has the knowledge and experience needed to ensure that the constraints and opportunities, as perceived and experienced by women and people with other social identities, are understood, considered, and addressed to assure sustainable and equitable development.

Community Engagement

Community engagement is a key cornerstone in many infrastructure projects. Timely, inclusive, and positive engagement with all community members and not just select leaders can be the difference between success and failure.

Engaging community members, who may be disadvantaged based on their identity, can sometimes be the solution to problems where traditional responses have failed. Infrastructure projects often benefit from bottom-up community input in project design as user needs, priorities, and aspirations are met, and key project-cycle related pain-points are reduced.

Community engagement is also the cornerstone of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) processes and can mitigate the risks around labor influx and enhance land compensation and livelihood restoration processes.

Distill Inclusion can assist in developing your knowledge and understanding of societal norms and community dynamics. Building on this, we will help to create an actionable roadmap to promote change during project implementation and enhance economic sustainability.