By Maleeha Zia
The theme of International Women’s Day this year, Break The Bias, aptly captures the core issue impacting women all over the world today.
Bias manifests itself as discrimination, exploitation, or harassment, and it can be quite subtle or blatantly overt. Empowering women is the holistic strategy espoused for breaking the bias.
Women empowerment is a broad term widely used to describe a range of actions and activities which aim principally at providing women equal opportunity in all walks of life and protecting them from threats of all kinds.
Today we see governments enacting laws for the protection and empowerment of women, NGOs, and the development sector enacting programs at the grassroots level to educate women and impart skills development and vocational training.
We see the women of the world themselves taking up cudgels to fight for their just rights through movements like the #metoo movement.
All these efforts are making a difference, albeit painfully slowly, and more needs to be done to both enhance the scale and the depth of the various measures being implemented.
The task is herculean and the challenge, complex.
Each country, each society has its own particular status quo and a set of challenges and limitations, dictated by history, culture, level of societal development overall, political and religious considerations, and still other factors.
However, one solution that can be regarded as universally applicable is to bring women into the mainstream of economic activity and societal development through financial empowerment or independence, by creating doable and sustainable livelihood earning opportunities.
Speaking at an event last month, Dr. Arif Alvi, the President of Pakistan emphasized this point, when he said, “A financially strong, educated, and healthy woman can act as a firm pillar of the society and also a symbol of real emancipation.”
He further added that digital inclusion could bring about a big change in the life of a woman by helping her choose an online job, to earn a livelihood.
It is important to note here that the role the corporate sector can play can be critical in this regard. An example here will serve to better illustrate this point.
foodpanda is mostly known as a food delivery company, operating online in 50 cities and towns or more across Pakistan. Regular customers swear by it.
foodpanda has expanded in a very short time well beyond its core business of food delivery into several related other businesses (or verticals as these are called in the business world) and has become one of the leading e-commerce platforms in the country.
Working totally in the digital space, foodpanda’s business has opened up fantastic new opportunities for women to earn a regular income. Naturally, foodpanda’s food delivery service has many female delivery riders.
Its online grocery shopping service pandmart which delivers your online ordered groceries within 30 minutes to your doorstep has female managers and staff in many of its over 60 stores nationwide.
The homechefs business which facilitates people to cook at home and take online orders to be delivered by foodpanda riders has over 5,000 registered home chefs, of whom 40% (and growing) are women.
Then, of course, there are a large number of women, even at senior levels, in the 1,000+ people directly employed by foodpanda in its offices.
The great beauty of opening earning opportunities for women in such services as delivery riders and home chefs is that the women have full flexibility to work when they wish to and how long every day they wish to, allowing them to meet their home responsibilities as well.
Home chefs have the great additional benefit of working from home, which in societies like ours is a real game-changer, as many women cannot go out to work for any one of several reasons.
Thus digital solutions to empowering women have opened up fantastic new opportunities for the financial empowerment of women.
As more women take up the livelihood earning opportunity offered by online businesses like foodpanda, the scale of women’s empowerment grows sustainably.
Of course, the company has further assured the success of such women entrepreneurs and workers by first training them in the usage of its app and digital technology, while also providing them training support in other areas like packaging, maintaining quality control, customer service, and so on.
It has in addition taken other specific actions for women empowerment, like facilitating loans for home chefs under the government’s Kamyab Jawan Programme and providing vocational training in collaboration with TEVTA.
These have been supplemented by HR-led initiatives like conducting harassment and unconscious bias training, and awareness-raising about the corporate gender equality policy.
Going even further, the company has established supplier diversity programs that actively seek to expand business relationships with women-owned enterprises.
As the world celebrates International Women’s Day once again this 8th of March, other players too, including the government and the development sector must thoroughly evaluate how digital technology with its immense potential can be further employed to break the barrier and empower women in many other fields of activity.
Maleeha is an experienced strategic communications specialist whose work has appeared in prestigious national and international publications. She can be reached at [email protected].
