Empowered Women Can Transform the World's Poorest Communities

I grew up in Kenya’s Kibera slum, the largest in Africa. My mom never went to school and struggled to make ends meet, picking up odd jobs to afford food and clean water for our family. Her dream was to get her kids an education so we would have a chance at a better life and find a way out of poverty. She spent months saving $3 for my school fees, only to learn the cost had been increased to $10. Refusing to accept defeat, she started a lending circle with other women in the slum. They pooled their money and gave it to a different woman each week to feed her family and enroll her kids in school.

I saw early on how a small but determined group of women can change the course of their families’ futures. That was when I started to realize that empowered women hold the keys to transforming the world’s poorest communities.

Transforming communities starts with education. Girls face many barriers to education, with cultural norms that prevent them from seeing themselves as leaders, load them up with caregiving responsibilities, and lead to child marriage, teen pregnancy, and gender-based violence. In Kenya, less than 20% of teenage girls complete secondary school, and one in six adolescent girls will become pregnant or already is a mother.

Girls’ education is one of the best investments in the world for lifting families out of poverty. Education puts girls on a path for more stable jobs, higher earnings, and greater opportunity for their families. In Kenya, every extra year of schooling boosts girls’ eventual wages by 1,020%. A powerful cycle begins: when women earn more and control their income, they are more likely to put their kids through school. Their daughters in turn can break the cycle of poverty for their families, eventually moving out of the slums.

More women in secondary school means entire communities are better off. Women with a secondary school education have fewer, healthier children who are more likely to reach adulthood and have lower rates of HIV/AIDS. They tend to have children later in life and are more likely to make informed decisions about family planning, reproductive resources, and child health.

Where girls’ education offers the promise of generational change, economic empowerment programs can have more immediate impacts that secure families’ educational goals. One study estimates that if women participated in the African economy on equal terms as men, 80 million people in Africa would be lifted out of poverty. But the gender gap persists, keeping women stuck in lower-paying, lower-quality jobs. Closing this gap means increasing access to decent work, making sure women in vulnerable communities have access to these opportunities, and providing women with the right tools to control their financial futures.

As challenging as these problems are, proven solutions exist. At Shining Hope for Communities, the organization I started 20 years ago, one of our longest-running programs is SWEP, which provides women living in Kenya’s slums with training on vocational skills, employability, and entrepreneurship. In the entrepreneurship course, women are encouraged to create small business plans, and the strongest receive financial support to launch their ideas. Many of the women who participate in SWEP have gone from extreme poverty to providing their families with three meals a day and saving enough money to pay school fees for their children.

Read More: Women’s Rights Will Determine Africa’s Future

Grameen Bank, a pioneering community development bank in Bangladesh, offers women affordable small loans or microcredit. Studies found that its borrowers had higher incomes than in unserved villages, and were more likely to make major household decisions. While not a silver-bullet solution to poverty, microcredit has proven impact—it expands access to financial services and can make household income more reliable, so families can better meet their needs.

Other programs focus on employment for undereducated women who typically work in informal jobs like housekeeping or casual labor. In India, a community-based women’s collective called the Self Employed Women’s Association, or SEWA, organized 6,000 street vendors in Delhi, resulting in formal recognition and labor protections that allowed women to work more hours and increase their monthly profits as much as 124%.

What these solutions have in common is they unlock women’s potential from within by providing them with more choices and allowing them to take the lead in solving their own problems. Having choices makes the difference between hope and desperation, which is why the most successful development programs are ones that invest in and empower local community members, embracing existing knowledge, values, and traditions. Men should not control the conversation, but they must be part of it—we need to be advocates and active participants in the fight against gender bias. This way, our communities can embrace new ideas with a sense of ownership, and we can learn to hold each other accountable as changemakers.

Putting women and girls at the heart of international development creates powerful pathways out of poverty. We must reimagine a world where women grow up with every opportunity to participate fully and on equal terms as men, so that whole populations can benefit. It’s time to give women their rightful seat at the table. Global progress depends on it.

Kennedy Odede is the CEO of Shining Hope for Communities and a member of the 2024 TIME100.

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