Rethinking impact: How we capture what matters to women entrepreneurs

This blog explores how CARE has worked to strengthen measurement by grounding indicators in the voices of women entrepreneurs. Their participatory and iterative approach demonstrates how concepts such as “success” and “resilience” can be translated into evolving, practical measures that both inform programming and reflect the complexity of women’s lives.

Women entrepreneurs in emerging markets can be powerful drivers of economic growth but they also experience complex barriers that may prevent them from achieving their full potential: limited access to finance, unequal household responsibilities, restrictive social norms, and exclusion from networks and markets.

Just as program implementers work to address these challenges, as monitoring and evaluation professionals, we also have a responsibility to better understand these barriers and monitor the progress women make in overcoming them. Yet our indicators in this field frequently default to what’s easiest to quantify (like profit) rather than what reflects the full scope of women’s experiences and aspirations.

What does it mean to be a successful entrepreneur?

Last year, my team at CARE asked women in Peru, Pakistan, and Vietnam this question as part of our Strive Women baseline research. Some of the answers were what you’d expect: stable profit, good sales, many customers. But most spoke about something deeper - ability, confidence, and leadership - qualities that are not easy to measure. Women told us:   

• “A successful businesswoman takes care of her children and extended family while running her business.”

• “A successful entrepreneur is one who knows her customer.”

 Other women spoke about the ability to overcome challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic and harmful social norms. Success was also defined as “wins” in their household, such as their children achieving good marks in school.  

Avoiding oversimplification

 These responses should challenge us to reflect on the limitations of how change is typically defined and assessed in our programming. It's easy to measure and quantify income increases or asset accumulation, but much harder to capture all the nuanced ways that women's lives change over time.  

Of course, this challenge isn’t new. Researchers have long grappled with how to capture changes to concepts like “empowerment” and “quality of life.” These are terms that often feel too contextual or dynamic to be captured through traditional survey instruments.  

But here’s what I worry about: in many cases, our pursuit of precision can sometimes lead to inaction. As researchers, we spend a lot of time debating how to choose the right research question, the best indicator, or the most rigorous method. And that rigour is important because it helps us build credible evidence. At the same time, it can sometimes discourage innovation – creating a sense that trying something new is too risky because it opens us up to criticism. 

That hesitancy has consequences. When we choose not to include a particular indicator or outcome, not because it doesn’t matter but because we couldn’t figure out how to ask it in a survey, it may get left out of programming entirely. 

I've been inspired by researchers like economist Rachel Glennerster, who argues: "People have said empowerment is a process [so] it is impossible to quantify—and my reaction is no! It's just hard. That doesn't mean it's impossible."  

The difficulty of measurement doesn't justify abandoning the attempt. Instead, it calls us to be more creative and participatory in our approach.  

Grounding M&E frameworks in lived experience

Just as women’s lives are fluid, meaningful monitoring and evaluation frameworks need to evolve to reflect changing realities.

At Strive Women we made a deliberate choice from the outset to define success based on what women entrepreneurs told us mattered most in their lives. Through conversations with women entrepreneurs, we identified key areas that mattered to them – not just business outcomes, but also their ability to navigate challenges, recover from the setbacks, and achieve household successes.

One example of how these conversations informed our framework was the way women spoke about the level of decision-making and control, which challenged us to think differently about what success looks like. While conventional indicators often equate more decision-making power with better outcomes, many women described how shared decision-making reflected trust, support, and family collaboration. Others noted that too much individual responsibility could feel isolating or burdensome. In response, we adapted our tools to ask women not just how much control they had, but how much they wanted – acknowledging that agency and fulfillment is not one-size-fits-all.

Drawing on these insights, along with past research, we developed a program and measurement framework around four pillars:

• Financial resilience: The ability to prepare for, withstand, and recover from financial shocks
• Business management and growth: The use of tools and strategies to grow a business
• Confidence and control: The belief in one’s ability to manage and make decisions
• Quality of life: The balance between household and business responsibilities

While this framework offered a strong foundation, we’ve treated it as a living tool. Just as women’s lives are fluid, meaningful measurement approaches should similarly be fluid to capture evolving realities. Since its publication, we’ve received useful suggestions for strengthening or expanding our indicators.

Evaluation systems should evolve as we learn more - not remain static. Practically, that might mean adding new indicators mid-project because participants raise outcomes we hadn’t originally considered, or disaggregating data by different sub-groups. It could involve incorporating more in-depth qualitative interviews to complement survey findings or designing flexible modules (short sets of questions that can be added or swapped out over time). This way, we preserve the consistency needed for longitudinal analysis, while still leaving space to respond to what we learn along the way. 

We’ve also built in ways to stay responsive over time. For example, we’re introducing a financial health scorecard – a short 15-question tool used every 3-6 months to track women entrepreneurs’ evolving needs and challenges. It won’t replace our full evaluation tools, but it adds a lighter-touch way to stay close to women’s evolving experiences.

What I’ve learned through this process is simple: listening leads to better measurement. When we take time to ask women what success means to them, we’re able to develop frameworks that are more relevant, inclusive, and grounded in their lived realities.

There’s no shortcut to doing this well. Participatory approaches take time, iteration, and humility. They may feel “messy” compared to standardised tools, but they generate insights that matter for programme design, policy influence, and for the individuals we aim to support.

As evaluators and researchers, we need to move beyond what is easiest to measure and accept that complexity is part of the work. Our responsibility is not to simplify our participants’ experiences to better fit our tools – but to design tools that reflect and respect the full richness of their lives.