Participatory, Contextual Design to Serve Women with Ana Pantelić
Tell us about your work around women and girls, and what has emerged as insightful to you:
International development scholars, policymakers and practitioners have looked at gender along a continuum - starting with what’s known as “gender discriminatory design,” such as with cash transfer programs that specifically target women as the recipients of cash, all the way to “gender transformative design,” which implies a shift in societal norms with women’s full economic participation.
The conversation around cash gained significant momentum with the popularization of microfinance, as well as the launch of large-scale government-led conditional cash transfer programs about 25 years ago. These approaches transformed the narrative of directed cash transfers and women’s economic empowerment, and when I first began research in this field, we had rich data to back those claims. Conditional cash transfer programs were having a significant impact on communities, building financial resilience and increasing women’s participation in household decision-making, while also improving health and education outcomes for children. Cash transfers became popular not only in international development interventions, but also in humanitarian work. Researchers, policymakers and practitioners came together to share data and build the evidence base, and as a result of those investments, ten years later we have a much more nuanced understanding of the complexity of gender in development.
What that research shows is that while directed cash has a lot of benefits, it might also be keeping women in traditional gender roles by adding more work to their plates, and some studies indicate that directed cash has actually led to increases in gender-based violence. Does this mean that we should stop targeting programming for women, or that cash transfers are a failure? Of course not! It just means that… it’s complicated. That’s why designing for women is so challenging, and also rewarding.
What advice do you have for someone designing for women and girls?
Celebrate progress along the journey
You can maintain the gender transformative goals as your North Star, but don’t push an agenda at any cost, particularly if you’re seeing that it could cause harm or that it doesn’t fit into the local context. When I was working with the Colombian government while at Fundación Capital, we sought to increase women’s financial inclusion by encouraging savings in the formal financial system, but also recognized that any form of savings (including women keeping cash under the mattress) was progress. For women living in rural areas, for whom banking services were physically and financially inaccessible, it’s obvious why they would maintain low savings balances in their accounts. You can encourage women to save in the bank, but you’ll have a lot more impact if you celebrate incremental steps on the pathway to improved financial health.
Ask women to define success metrics
By understanding the user experience and local context, and asking women to define progress in their own words, you’ll be in a better position to celebrate milestones along the way. If we stick with the same example of women’s financial inclusion, the Western expectations of success often involve women making financial decisions on their own. But even in high-income countries, many women prefer to make financial decisions with their partners or family members, so why would we expect to see something different in low-income communities? Yes, there is a significant difference in power balances, but dismissing participation as being an insufficient marker of success can actually mean imposing a cultural or value system. That’s why participation is so critical, and why we should not only advocate for, but also respect the voices and choices of women, ensuring they are the ones designing more equitable systems and pathways to achieve economic empowerment.
Match gender outcomes with local context
Over the past 15 years that I’ve been engaged in international development, I’ve come to question some of the language and expectations around designing for gender outcomes without factoring in the local context. We set the bar so high, with practitioners claiming their approaches are gender-responsive, or funders seeking gender-transformative outcomes in country contexts that are nowhere near ready for it, that we run the risk of the language losing meaning.
Rather than throwing buzzwords around, we should be designing for the local context and working towards progress along that continuum, as opposed to a great leap forward. Around the world, 40% of countries still limit women’s rights to manage assets, so we can’t expect to see overnight radical transformation without investing in systems change and addressing social norms. To do that, we need to become more comfortable celebrating incremental change, and the milestones along the way, making sure that we’re not causing harm by pushing for progress that doesn’t fit the local context.
What are some products, services, programs that you think are truly designing for women? Which areas do you wish to see more intentionally designed offerings for women?
The easiest way to answer that question is to remove all the incentives that are often baked into the products, services and programs designed for women, and then track their adoption and use. Women are savvy because they experience time poverty and therefore have to prioritize where they engage. I saw this first-hand when co-creating a low-cost, scalable, digital solution and distribution model to improve the financial health of low-income women living in rural areas, called the LISTA Initiative. Participation was voluntary and the only incentive was a certificate, but we reached twice as many people as we planned, so we knew we were doing something right. Over the years we iterated on the initiative and it has gone from a thousand users in Colombia, to reaching nearly a million people in a dozen low-income countries. We can attribute that success to the combination of tech, touch and trust, which I discuss in greater detail in a recent podcast interview, but it also has to do with participatory design and questioning who gets to sit at the decision-making table. This is a big part of what we do at MIT D-Lab, and a way of thinking that I’d love to see adopted by more policymakers and practitioners in international development so that we can all do better when designing for a more equitable world.
About Dr. Ana Pantelic
Dr. Ana Pantelic is an international development professional with nearly fifteen years of experience in policy and practice, who has guided and grown social impact organizations working at the confluence of systems change, innovation, and economic opportunity. Ana is the Executive Director of MIT D-Lab, which works with people around the world to develop and advance collaborative approaches and practical solutions to global poverty challenges through interdisciplinary courses, research in collaboration with global partners, technology development, and community initiatives. Prior to joining MIT, she was the interim Chief of Social Policy with UNICEF Uganda, where she worked with the government to design and develop the country’s first-ever urban social protection program for adolescent girls. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Belgrade in her native Serbia and an MA in International Relations from Boston University, speaks three languages, and has lived and worked on four continents.