IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/itintd/v4y2008i2p43-60.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Empowering Women Through ICT-Based Business Initiatives: An Overview of Best Practices in E-Commerce/E-Retailing Projects

Author

Listed:
  • Sylvia Maier

    (Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow, Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, New York University, 285 Mercer Street, 7-super-th floor, New York, New York 10003, USA, (212) 998-3857.)

  • Usha Nair-Reichert

    (Associate Professor, School of Economics, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA.)

Abstract

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been increasingly promoted as a key solution for comprehensive development, poverty eradication and the empowerment of historically disadvantaged groups, such as women and minorities in the Global South. ICT-based business initiatives, and e-commerce projects in particular, have been hailed as "potential goldmines" for women's empowerment. However, research and experience show that to be successful, projects must balance the need to overcome structural barriers to women's advancement with sensitivity to the limited space within which many women in the Global South navigate. In this paper, we review literature on ICT and empowerment of women, drawing upon several e-commerce/e-retailing projects as case studies to identify a set of best practices that underlie a successful project: 1) government and institutional support, 2) societal involvement, 3) training and empowerment, 4) expansion of market access, and 5) managerial best practices. We anticipate that the insights generated by this study will be useful both for purposes of effective program development and policy design. (c) 2008 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Suggested Citation

  • Sylvia Maier & Usha Nair-Reichert, 2008. "Empowering Women Through ICT-Based Business Initiatives: An Overview of Best Practices in E-Commerce/E-Retailing Projects," Information Technologies and International Development, MIT Press, vol. 4(2), pages 43-60, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:tpr:itintd:v:4:y:2008:i:2:p:43-60
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/itid.2008.00007
    File Function: link to full text
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tpr:itintd:v:4:y:2008:i:2:p:43-60. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kelly McDougall (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://direct.mit.edu/journals .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.