Economist​/Women’s Economic Empowerment Research Expert – Systematic Litera

Background

UN Women – the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women – exists to advance women’s rights, gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls.

The UN Women Care and Climate Entrepreneurship Accelerator, supported by Visa Foundation, is a regional initiative that empowers women‑owned and diverse small businesses in the care economy, green economy, and tourism sectors. The program seeks to build quality employment opportunities for women and to generate rigorous, policy‑relevant evidence on the impact of gender‑diverse entrepreneurship in advancing women’s labour‑force participation, decent work creation and inclusive economic transformation.

Women‑owned businesses that have outgrown microenterprise support but remain underserved by formal finance, markets and business ecosystems – the "Missing Middle" – lack consolidated evidence on how inclusive entrepreneurship intersects with care systems, climate resilience and decent work. There is a critical gap in integrated, cross‑sectoral analysis that articulates economic pathways linking gender‑diverse impact businesses to labour‑force participation and ecosystem transformation.

The Accelerator will address this gap through systematic evidence generation and ecosystem engagement.

UN Women is commissioning an International Consultant to conduct a systematic literature review and analytical synthesis on the role of women‑owned and women‑led businesses in care, green and tourism sectors. The review will consolidate existing academic and policy evidence, identify key conceptual frameworks and knowledge gaps, and delineate how ecosystem actors can work together to enable decent work creation and increased women’s labour‑force participation.

• Develop an Analytical Framework and Research Design
  • Create a framework grounded in business economics, gender, business and trade to examine enterprise‑level and system‑level effects and ecosystem‑level enablers and constraints.
  • Refine core research questions in consultation with UN Women.
  • Design search strategies, keywords, databases, and screening parameters.
  • Define inclusion and exclusion criteria, thematic scope (care, green, intersectional models) and evidence types (peer‑reviewed, grey literature).
  • Provide a detailed outline and analytical structure for the final report.
• Conduct Systematic Literature Review and Thematic Synthesis
  • Extract and synthesize evidence on definitions and typologies of women‑owned enterprises, especially Missing Middle segments.
  • Identify and categorize structural constraints (finance, markets, networks, regulation) and gender‑specific barriers (norms, care responsibilities, time poverty).
  • Analyze types of support and interventions (digitalization, finance, capacity‑building, market‑access).
  • Report firm‑level and socio‑economic outcomes such as growth, resilience, employment, and empowerment.
  • Conduct comparative analysis across contexts and sectors and create conceptual mapping of relationships between constraints, interventions, and outcomes.
  • Develop a constraint framework and an operational typology of women‑owned firms for future data collection.
  • Generate structured analytical outputs for policy relevance and investment insight.
• Knowledge Product Development
  • Translate technical evidence into a structured, policy‑relevant narrative aligned with the program.
  • Incorporate feedback from UN Women through agreed review rounds and finalize a publication‑ready analytical report.
• Ecosystem and Policy Implications
  • Synthesize ways for ecosystem actors (governments, policymakers, investors, support organisations, market players) to create decent work and employment opportunities.
  • Consider linkages to women’s participation in trade, markets and value chains, especially within care and green economies.
  • Articulate policy‑ and investment‑relevant insights to inform advocacy, ecosystem engagement and scaling.

The retainer contract is based on days worked, with work rendered on an "on call" basis. The maximum contract amount is not guaranteed. The consultant retains the right to decline…