Inclusive Innovations:
growing women’s small businesses and changing gendered institutions?

Saskia Vossenberg, Center for Frugal Innovation in Africa, Institute of Social Studies (ISS)

This presentation will discuss how a gendered institutional lens may serve as a framework for energy research and practice. We will share lessons that can be learnt from applying a gendered institutional framework to analyze the relationships between ‘inclusive innovations’ that seek to impact women’s small business growth and gendered institutions. Inclusive Innovations are new products, services and created institutions that seek to restructure the entrepreneurial behavior to improve the wellbeing of marginalized members of society, often targeted at women. Illustrated with empirical cases of inclusive innovations in Malawi, we argument the shortcomings of gender blind programming. Raising critical questions about the techno-optimistic narrative found in women’s entrepreneurship development as an untapped source of job supply and trigger of social and economic trade-offs such as economic empowerment. However, applying the framework also suggests that it is too simplistic to conclude that gender blind inclusive innovations cannot not make a difference in women’s lives. ‘Other transformations’ in everyday lives of women can occur and connect change induced by market engagement to gendered institutions. This raises questions about the feminist-pessimistic narratives found in post-structural feminist epistemology on the role of market solutions in transforming gender inequalities.

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