Mindful Saving: Exploring the Power of Savings for Women

In 2005 the ExxonMobil Foundation launched the “Women’s Economic Opportunity Initiative,” a global effort to help women fulfill their economic potential and drive economic and social change in their communities. ExxonMobil has invested more than $120 million on programs for women entrepreneurs to improve their productivity and income and empower them economically. ExxonMobil states that when women move forward, the world moves with them.

In 2013, in collaboration with the UN Foundation, ExxonMobil published A Roadmap for Promoting Women’s Economic Empowerment (Women’s Roadmap for short), which summarized the rigorous evidence on what worked to empower women economically, for whom, and where. The database for the Women’s Roadmap was updated in 2016 in Revisiting What Works.

In 2015, in collaboration with Data2X, a gender data initiative of the UN Foundation, ExxonMobil published guidance on how to measure women’s economic empowerment and on the theory of change behind this measurement. It devised a simple set of common metrics and encouraged Foundation grantees to use them to report progress. It also adjusted its investments to reflect the lessons learned and multiply their potential impact.

The same year, ExxonMobil, in collaboration with the Center for Global Development and partner researchers and project implementers, designed a pilot study consisting of two rigorous experiments to further test messages from the Women’s Roadmap review. The pilot study looked at the impacts of mobile savings tools and businesses training on the growth of women’s businesses and incomes in two countries: Indonesia and Tanzania.