ICR Stories

The ICR Facility is supporting its partners to increase women’s participation in public-private dialogues. Our new ICReport How to make the Business Environment work for Women’s Economic Empowerment builds on an earlier publication Promoting Women’s Organisations into Public-Private Dialogues in order to Foster Women’s Economic Empowerment in ACP Countries and demonstrates how the recommendations made can […]

The ICR Facility is supporting its partners to increase women’s participation in the labour force. Our new ICReport How to make the Business Environment work for Women’s Economic Empowerment builds on an earlier publication Business Environment Reforms to Promote Equal Opportunities for Women in the Labour Market and demonstrates how the recommendations made can be implemented […]

The ICR Facility is supporting its partners to increase women’s economic empowerment (WEE) by facilitating their access to finance. Our new ICReport How to make the Business Environment work for Women’s Economic Empowerment builds on an earlier publication Trends in Gender Finance in African Caribbean and Pacific Development Finance Institutions and demonstrates how the recommendations made […]

The ICR Facility is supporting its partners to increase women’s economic empowerment. But it is not always easy to get interest in this topic. It is often still seen as a lower priority for a country’s economic development and it is complex to tackle. Our new ICReport How to make the Business Environment work for […]

The Covid-19 pandemic laid bare economic vulnerabilities around the world, and in Eswatini and the Seychelles it highlighted the risks of overdependence on a few sectors to generate growth. More than that, it brought home the imperative of building diverse economies that help reduce inequalities, enhance environmental sustainability and create better employment opportunities for women […]

Travel isn’t always simple in central Africa – even between the 11 countries connected as part of the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS).   “Sometimes to travel to another country, you have to take a plane to another part of Africa – even to Europe – to come back to central Africa,” says […]

When more women participate in the economy, the whole society benefits. This is because, as indicated in a recent ICReport,  women’s economic empowerment leads to better businesses, better investments, better jobs and better family well-being. The ICR Facility, a project with the aim of improving the business environment in African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries […]

For Tricia Emberson, necessity was the mother of invention. Her family-owned Reload Bar and brewing business in Nuku’alofa, the capital of the Kingdom of Tonga, was reeling from the twin impacts of Covid-19 and the volcanic eruption and tsunami of January 2022. Her search for new sources of income led her to experiment with a […]

Kaduna State is leading the design and implementation of an innovative policy strategy that can contribute to the Nigeria Agenda 2050 objectives of reducing poverty and inequality and enabling a diversified private sector led economy. This policy will enable a conducive business environment to foster the development of Inclusive Business models. Inclusive Businesses (IBs) are […]

The ICR Facility is supporting its partners to lower legal and administrative barriers and increase access to finance for women-owned/led businesses. We are also mainstreaming an inclusive approach in industrial policies. Our new ICReport How to make the Business Environment work for Women’s Economic Empowerment builds on an earlier publication Business Environment Reforms to support […]

We revisit two of our projects in Ghana and Ethiopia to see how our initial work carried out in 2021 has laid the foundations for positive outcomes and business reform. In 2019, Sheila Elorm Enni was suddenly laid off from her job as a finance budget analyst in Ghana, a situation that left her devastated. […]

In 2022, we published a blog post recounting a field study conducted in the Bugesera and Rulindo regions of Rwanda. Our ICR intervention aimed to interact with producers and stakeholders from fifteen agroforestry value chains to assess the business environment of these and gain insights to further develop them.   Through this intervention, we partnered […]