Saïd Business School Track Walmart’s Empowerment Initiative: MBA News

A team of researchers from the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, has been commissioned by multinational retail corporation Walmart to conduct an independent global study into the effectiveness of its ‘Empowering Women Together’ (EWT) initiative.

 ‘Empowering Women Together’, launched in 2011, aims to show Walmart’s commitment to the full integration of women within the company’s supply chain as well as to empower women economically. The program is intended to provide support and market access to female-owned SMEs (small and medium enterprises) around the world, helping the companies to launch and scale up.

Currently most of the products produced by these female-led businesses are available solely through the ‘Empowering Women Together’ portal on the Walmart website, but recently the first supplier has begun trading in store and the hope is that many more enterprises will follow in this suit.

Professor Linda Scott, the researcher leading the evaluation at Saïd Business School, says in a press release that she has been impressed so far by the determination of both the EWT team at Walmart as well as by the women’s businesses themselves but admits that the program is still in its early stages. “We have already found that the usual expectations for measurement are going to need substantial augmentation,” she says. “There is a lot of variability and the outcomes are extremely complex. The challenge is to carefully build a system that will reliably measure the impact of this unique and important program, paying attention to the interactions among all the populations.”

Saïd will publish two ‘Empowering Women Together’ case studies this year

The researchers Professor Linda Scott, Catherine Dolan and Laurel Steinfeld, will be exploring issues of ethics, financial prerequisites, staffing and volume requirements as well as how the Walmart system contributes positively to business strength and in bettering operational settings for the company and its employees. The research will also attempt to evaluate the acceptance of the program by Walmart customers.

The preparation for the project evaluation began as early as autumn 2013 when the Saïd Business School researchers interviewed people throughout the Walmart chain in order to understand how initiating a EWT project worked. Now, the research team is focusing on participants within North America and East Africa, aiming to visit each supplier in these regions by August 2014. In 2015, the researchers will go on to evaluate suppliers in Latin America and Asia.

The research team plan to publicly publish two case studies in 2014 focusing on two EWT-launched, women-owned businesses. One will be the Women’s Bean Project based in Denver, USA and the other will be Katchy Kollections from Nairobi, Kenya. “We have already done the work in these two sites and are currently comparing the data before we begin to write.  Each of these businesses operates under vastly different conditions and yet there are some surprising similarities.  All of this is a challenge to develop a measurement metric which is appropriate for the full range of organizations involved in the system.”

Professor Scott, who also acts as DP World Chair of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Saïd Business School, will be blogging for the duration of the project in an effort to make the study as transparent as possible. “This study is an independent and rigorous academic research project, not a consulting job, and we expect that what we learn will be important for policy makers, Walmart, and other corporations undertaking similar initiatives,” she reflects. “Walmart is keen to refine the EWT program based on the study findings that impact long term viability, and we want to make the ‘lessons learned’ widely available.”

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