In partnership with UN Women, Amarante spent 9 months on the ground in northern Senegal’s Saint Louis region. We didn’t just collect data; we listened to stories. Through face-to-face interviews with 200+ rural women farmers, 4 focus group discussions, and deep dives with 20+ ecosystem actors, we explored the hidden risks of unpaid care work, one of the many invisible barriers standing between women and true economic empowerment.

Our goal was never a report for a shelf, it was evidence based, for action. Our research fed directly into shortlisting real-world digital risk-financing solutions. Today, 4 out of 5 of these are tied to health or agricultural insurance, built specifically around what these women actually need, not what was easiest to develop. The scale of what’s at stake is hard to overstate: globally, women perform 16 billion hours of unpaid care work every day, and unpaid care responsibilities keep 708 million women out of the labour market entirely. Close that gap, and the upside is enormous, valued even at minimum wage, unpaid care work would add close to $11 trillion to the global economy each year, and addressing it could unlock nearly 300 million jobs by 2035. [ilo]

That’s what “empowered women empower the nation” means to us in practice: when  invisible burdens are reduced and women are given the tools to participate fully, the ripple effect reaches families, communities, and entire economies. It’s a conversation playing out well beyond our own work too – the African Development Bank’s Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa (AFAWA) has approved over $1.8 billion toward closing Africa’s ~$49 billion financing gap for women entrepreneurs, and has partnered with UN Women directly on programs like supporting women-led agricultural cooperatives in Cote d’Ivoire. Actors across the continent are working to turn that empowerment from an idea into infrastructure.

Research is only half the job; the other half is making sure it doesn’t stay locked in a report. That’s why knowledge dissemination is core to how we work. Our initiatives directly advanced women’s financial inclusion, economic autonomy, and resilience through tailored digital frameworks:

• Malawi Agricultural Credit Initiative: Empowered rural women farmers by introducing dedicated agricultural loans, an objective credit scoring system, and mobile money integrations (Airtel) that provided secure, direct access to capital right from their mobile phones.
• UPU Global Postal Network Study: Enabled postal operators across 8 countries to architect specialized financial products for vulnerable female segments and entrepreneurs by using post-fintech partnerships to bridge the gender gap in delivery channels
• Microfund for Women (MFW) Digital Strategy: Designed a comprehensive digital transformation roadmap that modernized the MFI’s technical architecture and scaled internal processes to expand digital financial channels for underserved female microentrepreneurs.

Empowered women don’t just change their own lives, they empower their household, their communities and their nation. That’s the thread running through everything we do.