Industry accounts for nearly a quarter of Côte d’Ivoire’s GDP, yet the share of women working in this sector has nearly halved from just over 10% in 2013 to under 6% today. As women made gains in agriculture and services, they were being left behind in a sector that has helped make Côte d’Ivoire one of West Africa’s most vibrant economies.
This finding is at the heart of a new study conducted by the ICR Facility on behalf of the Confédération Générale des Entreprises de Côte d’Ivoire (CGECI), the national employers’ organisation. The study analyses women’s participation in the industrial sector and sets out concrete steps to increase their representation.
It draws on consultations with 20 business organisations and 31 women entrepreneurs across Côte d’Ivoire, supplemented by fieldwork in Abidjan and other industrial hubs. It also benchmarks the country’s performance against Ghana, a regional peer with a similar income level, and Thailand, an upper middle-income country where women’s participation in industry is nearly equal to that of men.
Shrinking participation in a booming sector
In Côte d’Ivoire, the industrial sector accounted for 23.1% of GDP in 2023 and it is expected to grow by 8.8% annually over the next three years. It provides formal employment to 312,100 people, but with an overall informality rate of around 92% in Côte d’Ivoire, the actual number of jobs is considerably higher.
The industrial landscape is diverse, spanning construction, agro-food processing, energy, mining, petroleum and other manufacturing. Women are most active in agro-food industries and small-scale manufacturing, but are under-represented in more technical and higher-value industries such as extractives, metallurgy and energy.
Women can be found in nearly all industrial roles, from entry level to CEO. Yet they are often concentrated in low-skilled positions and their representation diminishes with each step up the hierarchy. Women account for just 14% of formal industrial business owners.
As industrial employment has expanded rapidly, the share of women working in industry has declined sharply from 10.27% to 5.91% over the past decade, even as men’s participation rate increased. In other words, while the absolute number of women in industry may have risen slightly, men have taken the lion’s share of new jobs.
CGECI members participating in the BER4WEE training in Côte d’Ivoire, January 2024.
A gender participation in industry index developed for the study, in which 1.0 indicates full parity, places Côte d’Ivoire at 0.43, compared with 0.72 in Ghana and 0.77 in Thailand. The study attributes the higher scores in the benchmark countries to reforms dating back to the 2000s, particularly around girls’ education.
Why progress has stalled
Côte d’Ivoire has undertaken significant reforms on gender equality and scores higher (95/100) than Ghana (75) and Thailand (78) on the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law index (2024), which evaluates how laws, policies, and practices enable or constrain women’s economic opportunities. The Ivorian government has introduced reforms to promote equal opportunities and combat discriminatory practices, but these initiatives remain largely unknown, because they have not been sufficiently publicised and because of low education levels.
Lack of schooling and training is a major barrier for women in industry. The sector is quite technical and requires a minimum level of qualifications and skills, both for entrepreneurs and employees. But in Côte d’Ivoire, 55% of women over the age of 15 are illiterate and 18% have only primary-level schooling. Less than 27% of women use the internet, compared with 40% of men. Moreover, gender stereotypes frame industry as a male domain and discourage women’s enrolment in technical training programmes.
The study finds that women entrepreneurs are often unaware of legal, regulatory and fiscal frameworks needed to access markets. One example cited by Anastasie Kadja-Ohouo, the Entrepreneurship Lead at CGECI, is around government procurement. “The state reserves 30% of its contracts for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). There is no specific quota for women-owned firms, but women entrepreneurs need to know that they can benefit from public procurement. They also need the training to respond to calls for proposals and prepare competitive bids.”
Another barrier for women-owned SMEs is access to finance. On average, women earn 41% less than men. Added to that, only one-third of women own land versus two-thirds of men, meaning they are disadvantaged in meeting the collateral requirements for bank loans, leaving them with less capital to build businesses. There are specific financing mechanisms for women, but in practice these loans are poorly adapted and too small to meet the real costs of industrial investment.
High taxation presents another obstacle. In Côte d’Ivoire, taxes on business profits exceed 50% compared with around 33% in Ghana and Thailand. One interviewee did not mince her words: “Taxes kill businesses. As soon as you create your company […] you’re taxed immediately.” Another added: “People complain that women own businesses in the industrial sector but refuse to formalise them. Even if I don’t agree with their choice – because they miss out on many opportunities to grow their businesses – they’re not wrong. They’re afraid of paying taxes.”
Advocating and modelling change
The report recommends a number of measures to ensure women’s full participation in industry.
One is to consolidate existing funding initiatives into a single, well-resourced fund to expand the number of women-owned businesses in industry. The report recommends tailored financing instruments for women entrepreneurs, including concessional loans, adapted bank products and risk-sharing mechanisms.
It also calls for the replacement of gender-neutral industrial policies with ones that take gender differences into account. It recommends tax incentives to promote formalisation and enterprise growth. And it highlights the need for effective campaigns to encourage girls and women to pursue careers in industrial fields.
Now that the report is finalised, CGECI plans to promote this agenda at the highest level. “With support from the ICR Facility, we are preparing a lobbying note that will be shared with the State–Private Sector Consultation Committee (Comité de Concertation État–Secteur Privé) as part of a national public–private dialogue framework,” says Anastasie Kadja-Ohouo. “We hope that advocacy will lead to changes in rules and practices that advance women’s entrepreneurship and gender issues [in industry],” she adds.
Besides advocating for the above recommendations, CGECI will call for promotion of girls’ education in science and technology and support for women entrepreneurs to grow industrial enterprises, including through micro-enterprise incubators. Further up the scale, it will advocate for greater diversity within the management of companies.
Complementing this external advocacy, CGECI is also embracing internal change. It joined international peer exchanges on women’s economic empowerment at an ICR Facility conference in Rwanda. Staff members then completed the ICR Facility’s training on business environment reform to support women’s economic empowerment. “This made us realise that CGECI’s gender work was not well structured,” says Kadja-Ohouo, and led to the creation of a Gender Unit within CGECI and the formulation of a gender action plan to guide its internal reforms and public advocacy.
As it took these important steps, CGECI also launched a women’s network that promotes gender diversity on boards of directors. As Kadja-Ohouo notes, “The more women sit on boards of directors, the more they will be able to influence corporate governance strategies to make them more inclusive. But none of this can happen without men — they also have a big role to play.”
The publication of this ICR Story was led by Expertise France (author: Adam Pillsbury). This was produced with the financial support of the European Union (EU), the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States (OACPS) under the 11th European Development Fund (EDF), the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and the British Council.
The ICR Facility is implemented GIZ, the British Council, Expertise France, and SNV. The contents of the publication are the sole responsibility of Expertise France and do not necessarily reflect the views of the EU, OACPS, BMZ or the other implementing partners.
