Mayra Buvinic
Senior Fellow
Bio
Mayra Buvinic, an internationally recognized expert on gender and development and social development, is a Senior Fellow both at the Center for Global Development and the United Nations Foundation. Previously, she was Director for Gender and Development at the World Bank. She also worked at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) where she headed the Social Development Division and was founding member and President of the International Center for Research on Women. She has a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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6/6/18
Basic page
CGD commissioned additional research to analyze the context, methodology and results of the pilot study on mobile savings for women entrepreneurs. The following papers provide in-depth studies of existing literature on savings and the results across various stages of the pilot’s progress. More papers will be added as the project progresses.
April 30, 2018
Publications
A study of women and men business owners in East Java offers a unique opportunity to analyze characteristics of entrepreneurs and their businesses by gender for a country where such systematic data are scarce. The study is one of two randomized controlled trials launched in 2015 to assess the power of mobile savings and training for women entrepreneurs. This report details baseline results from the Indonesia trial, still under way, which is testing whether providing financial literacy training for women who are potential bank clients and varying financial incentives to bank agents promoting a new mobile savings product make a difference in increasing entrepreneurs’ uptake of formal savings and in improving economic outcomes. Short-term results of the other trial, in Tanzania, were reported in the first report in this series.
May 1, 2018
Event
Over 1 billion women lack access to financial services due to economic and social barriers, time and mobility constraints, and discrimination in service provision. Financial services delivered digitally can address these barriers by providing women with safe and accessible channels. This event will look at the recent evidence and emerging technologies that work to empower women economically.
March 22, 2018
Publications
Mobile savings hold great promise for empowering women entrepreneurs. Women are often disproportionately burdened by high transaction costs to access savings accounts.
Pages
January 30, 2017
Blog Post
Kellyanne Conway called him a “man of action” after a whirlwind first week in which President Trump signed 14 Executive Orders and presidential memoranda, covering most of his key campaign issue areas from health to immigration to trade. It should be noted that President Obama signed 13 such orders in his first week, including an order to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, which he was unable to achieve in eight years in office.
President Trump’s agenda will undoubtedly face policy hurdles and legal challenges (starting with Saturday’s late night stay of certain measures in his immigration order), but the breakneck pace at which he has wielded the pen signals his intention to carry through his most strident campaign promises.
In a series of blogs, CGD experts have been examining how some of these specific policy intentions could impact development progress. As you would expect from a group of economists, we believe in—and encourage—evidence-based policymaking, and here we look at what the existing evidence and research tell us about how likely these Executive Orders are to achieve the president’s stated goals.
Executive Orders Affecting Refugees Will Only Harm the US National Interest
By Cindy Huang and Hannah Postel
On Friday night, President Trump signed an executive order temporarily banning refugees and citizens of seven majority Muslim nations from entering the United States. Our research shows this ban will result not only in serious harm to the world’s most vulnerable, but will also alienate allies the United States needs to fight violent extremism and protect American interests.
A Microcosm of US Border Policy toward MexicoBy Kimberly Ann Elliott
Some months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the US government shut down all unofficial, unmanned border crossings with Mexico. In 2013, that crossing was reopened. The re-opening has been a win-win for people on both sides of the border. But with Trump’s executive order calling for construction of the border wall, much remains to be seen in the realm of US-Mexico cooperation.
Cutting UN Funding Will Cost the USBy Charles Kenny
The New York Times reported last week that the Trump Administration is considering a new Executive Order that mandates cutting all funding to bodies that give full membership to the Palestinian Authority and fund abortion amongst other categories, but also suggests “at least a 40 percent overall decrease” in remaining US funding towards international organizations. The proposed cuts would do almost nothing to reduce the deficit while weakening US national security and international leadership.
Zombie Policy on International Family Planning Rises AgainBy Amanda Glassman
On his first day in the office, President Trump signed an executive order reinstating a 30-year-old political hot potato, the “Mexico City Policy." Like many, I will point out that reinstating the global gag rule does not reduce abortion.
Podcast: Empowering Women Can Make America GreatBy Amanda Glassman, Mayra Buvinic, and Charles Kenny
The scale of the turnout at the Women’s Marches across the world recently, along with President Trump’s early reinstatement of a ban on US funding for organizations that offer family planning services in foreign countries, seem to suggest an administration already at odds with an entire gender. On this podcast, three CGD senior fellows weigh in on the evidence that engaging and empowering women—both at home and overseas—makes good sense, especially in an America-First strategy.
December 14, 2017
Blog Post
What will you remember about 2017? The growing crisis of displacement? The US pulling out of the Paris agreement and reinstating the global gag rule on family planning? Or that other countries reaffirmed their commitment to the Paris agreement, that Canada launched a feminist international assistance policy, that Saudi Arabia finally let women drive?
CGD experts have offered analysis and ideas all year, but now it's time to look forward.
What's going to happen in the world of development in 2018? Will we finally understand how to deal equitably with refugees and migrants? Or how technological progress can work for developing countries? Or what the impact of year two of the Trump Administration will be?
Today’s podcast, our final episode of 2017, raises these questions and many more as a multitude of CGD scholars share their insights and hopes for the year ahead. You can preview their responses in the video below.
Thanks for listening. Join us again next year for more episodes of the CGD Podcast.
September 15, 2017
Publications
In 1995 India’s Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) organized women waste pickers in Ahmedabad into a cooperative to improve their working conditions and livelihoods. Over time, this informal arrangement evolved into Gitanjali—a women-owned and -run social enterprise. With support from key partners, Gitanjali has generated social value, providing its members with safe and dignified work while increasing their earnings. While Gitanjali faces challenges in becoming a fully self-sufficient social enterprise, its experience offers insights for other initiatives seeking to provide opportunities for women to transition from informal to formal work.
May 1, 2018
Event
Over 1 billion women lack access to financial services due to economic and social barriers, time and mobility constraints, and discrimination in service provision. Financial services delivered digitally can address these barriers by providing women with safe and accessible channels. This event will look at the recent evidence and emerging technologies that work to empower women economically.
November 2, 2016
Publications
Revisiting What Works updates the evidence first published in the 2013 Roadmap for Promoting Women’s Economic Empowerment and, as with the Roadmap, privileges short-term interventions that the private sector can sponsor and undertake. The Roadmap used rigorous evidence from 136 evaluations to identify proven, promising, high-potential and unproven interventions to increase women’s productivity and earnings in developing countries.
September 6, 2016
Publications
Women’s economic empowerment is increasingly recognized as critical to achieving development outcomes around the world. Informed by a roundtable discussion at the Center for Global Development (CGD) and additional suggestions from CGD researchers, this four-point memo aims to issue practical proposals for the next US administration, particularly aimed at economically empowering women and girls worldwide, as a building block toward the full realization of broader gender equality and women’s agency and empowerment. The recommendations build on those in CGD’s The White House and the World briefing book, as well as the CGD policy memo “A US Law or Executive Order to Combat Gender Apartheid in Discriminatory Countries” and ongoing work at CGD focused on women’s financial inclusion.
May 22, 2017
Publications
A review of the recent evaluation evidence on financial services and training interventions questions their gender neutrality and suggests that some design features in these interventions can yield more positive economic outcomes for women than for men. These include features in savings and ‘Graduation’ programs that increase women’s economic self-reliance and self-control, and the practice of repeated micro borrowing that increases financial risk-taking and choice. Subjective economic empowerment appears to be an important intermediate outcome for women that should be promoted and more reliably and accurately measured. Lastly, whenever possible, results should be sex-disaggregated and reported for individuals as well as households.
October 31, 2016
Publications
The US has a unique opportunity to lead in improving economic opportunities for women and girls by establishing a global vision and a corresponding fund with significant financial resources to spur change. The next US administration should allocate at least $1 billion in additional resources—equal to a little over two percent of current US overseas assistance—exclusively dedicated to advancing gender equality in developing countries, with a specific focus on improving women’s and girls’ economic opportunities and outcomes.
Pages
May 22, 2017
Publications
A review of the recent evaluation evidence on financial services and training interventions questions their gender neutrality and suggests that some design features in these interventions can yield more positive economic outcomes for women than for men. These include features in savings and ‘Graduation’ programs that increase women’s economic self-reliance and self-control, and the practice of repeated micro borrowing that increases financial risk-taking and choice. Subjective economic empowerment appears to be an important intermediate outcome for women that should be promoted and more reliably and accurately measured. Lastly, whenever possible, results should be sex-disaggregated and reported for individuals as well as households.
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