Equity & Inclusion
Equity & Inclusion
OUR WORK
Advancing Women’s Economic Empowerment
Women’s economic empowerment is fundamental to enhancing business competitiveness, building equitable societies, and driving inclusive growth. Abt is leading a flagship Southeast Asia initiative—Investing in Women (IW)—to foster inclusive economic growth by empowering women to thrive across the economy. Launched in 2016 through an AUD102 million commitment from the Australian Government, IW bases its efforts on three main pillars: impact investing, workplace gender equality, and influencing gender norms.
Impact Investing
Working with financial intermediaries to mobilize private capital, the program intervenes on the supply-side constraints of capital for women-led or -owned small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Our blended finance approach is a “capital plus” model, where we provide catalytic capital to seed investment funds and supplement it with advisory services and operational grants that strengthen investing partners’ capacity to invest with a gender lens.
We also provide technical assistance grants that help investors to support their new investees in taking full advantage of the growth capital available to them. When we launched IW in 2016 in Southeast Asia, there was limited interest in investing in women-owned SMEs. Our initial leverage was negligible, and there were few commercial investments in the first gender-lens funds that IW seeded. Over the next five years, leverage ratios have consistently increased to over 5X in 2021, with our portfolio funds and companies raising subsequent funding from private capital markets. To bolster sustainability, IW has also strengthened key industry networks in Southeast Asia’s investing ecosystem to champion gender-lens investing through convenings, workshops, practical tools, and other resources.
Workplace Gender Equality
Working with influential businesses in Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Myanmar, IW is helping to shift workplace cultures, practices, and policy barriers to achieve workplace gender equality (WGE). IW has formed four country-level business coalitions that drive change from the top, with member CEOs making concrete commitments to WGE, such as working toward equal pay and creating an environment where women have opportunity equal to their male counterparts. These four business coalitions are important voices for gender equality in their respective countries.
The coalitions bring together a growing number of leading companies in the region, including global brands such as Accenture, Deloitte, and Coca-Cola, as well as prominent national and regional corporations. Among these companies, more than 60 percent have conducted rigorous, third-party certified WGE assessments of their workforce, policies, and business practices.
Influencing Gender Norms
Global progress on gender equality continues to be slowed by social norms, attitudes, and practices that restrict women’s participation in the economy. By launching IW’s Influencing Gender Norms initiative, Abt aims to shift the norms that inhibit women’s economic inclusion. The program is working with organizations in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam to identify and connect urban millennial “early adopters” of progressive gender attitudes. Our theory is that this demographic segment is in a strong position to influence the assumptions and practices of the broader societies in which they live.
Abt’s ground-breaking gender-norms research spans Southeast Asia. For example, we conducted research on masculinity involving 2,500 respondents in Vietnam. In the Philippines, we analyzed more than 1,000 television, radio, and print ads run within a single year, generating evidence on how advertisements rely on gender-stereotyped portrayals of women and men at home and in workplaces.
UN Sustainable Development Goals
UN Global Compact Principles
Impact
Results We Generated
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Seeded 11 investment vehicles/funds with AUD36M that scaled our initiatives to >AUD190M in leverage funding
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4 country-level workplace gender equality business coalitions formed, impacting the work lives of more than 804,000 employees of the 78 member companies
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>60% of the business coalitions’ member companies have conducted 3rd-party certified gender equality assessments
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>18 million people reached online and >230,000 people engaged in community activities with messaging to influence gender norms and normalize women’s participation in the economy
Client & Project
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Australia Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
Investing in Women
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Strengthening Child and Family Well-being
Preventing child abuse and neglect is a collective effort. For more than three decades, Abt’s work has supported the policies and programs that protect those who are most vulnerable. We are at the forefront of building the evidence for prevention, disseminating best practices nationally, providing technical assistance to ensure evaluations yield actionable evidence, and putting evidence into practice to promote child well-being and healthy families.
Protecting children requires bringing together a comprehensive array of cross-sector partners across the social determinants of health to strengthen families and build the capacity of community-based services.
Supporting the Prevention Services Clearinghouse
The Prevention Services Clearinghouse (PSC) provides stakeholders with an objective and transparent review of research on programs and services intended to provide enhanced support to children and families and prevent foster care placements. The Clearinghouse team at Abt developed systematic, rigorous, and transparent standards and procedures to review and rate programs and services. Clearinghouse staff use these procedures and services to identify and select programs and services for review, conduct comprehensive literature searches, review eligible studies of each program and service, and assign program and service ratings.
Within the first year of the contract, Abt developed a comprehensive review system and online database. The Abt team reviewed 25 programs and services in the first 18 months of the project while also developing a user-friendly, interactive website. The site enables PSC stakeholders to see detailed content about each program reviewed, providing them with solid evidence to inform policy and budgetary decisions.
PREVENTING REMOVALS AND IMPROVING FAMILY REUNIFICATION
Substance use disorders can destabilize families and potentially lead to long-term negative consequences for children. With the opioid crisis continuing to affect so many families, the child welfare system has seen increases in removals of children from homes where parental substance use disorder (SUD) is a contributing factor. Abt is identifying interventions that may prevent removals and improve family reunification for families affected by SUD. We are also determining the feasibility of a rigorous impact evaluation of these interventions, which include recovery coaching, to examine their effects on parent well-being and child welfare.
ADVANCING COMMUNITY APPROACHES TO PREVENT CHILD MALTREATMENT
The child welfare field is undergoing a transformation from responding to incidents of child maltreatment, to working to prevent child maltreatment from occurring in the first place. As a result, the Administration for Children and Families has funded a set of grantees to design and implement community-level approaches to preventing child maltreatment. Abt is providing evaluation technical assistance to grantees and their evaluators in 13 communities and documenting each grantee’s community-level, child-safety approach. The project is helping to build critical evidence to support the development and expansion of community approaches to preventing child maltreatment.
UN Sustainable Development Goals
UN Global Compact Principles
Impact
Results We Generated
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Advanced Clearinghouse rigor, transparency, and validity by developing Handbook of Standards and Procedure
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25 programs and services reviewed and results posted
Client & Project
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U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—Administration for Children & Families (ACF)
Replicable Recovery and Reunification Interventions for Families
Title IV Prevention Services Clearinghouse, Child Welfare Community Collaborations
Building Capacity to Evaluate Child Welfare Community Collaborations to Strengthen and Preserve Families
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Building Foundational Literacy in Malawi
Children around the world have faced a difficult reality as COVID-19 has forced school closures. While the solution in many countries has been to transition students to online classes, that was not an option in Malawi, where only about 14 percent of the population has internet access.
Abt has helped address the educational challenges through its work on USAID’s Yesani Ophunzira (YESA) Activity, which we have led for the past three years. We have focused on building the capacity of teachers in Malawi’s 5,476 primary schools to gauge and improve foundational literacy skills and reading comprehension for Standards 1–4 (grades/years 1–4). Our initial work with the Ministry of Education (MoE) involved conducting the 2018 National Reading Assessment, through which we found that 75 percent of children could not read a single familiar word—such as “father” or “mother”—in Chichewa, the language of instruction in primary school at the end of Standard 2. The Abt team developed a continuous assessment and remediation (CA&R) approach that includes robust methods and tools for teachers to improve reading skills. We have since trained more than 46,000 teachers across the country on how to implement CA&R in their classrooms.
Just as we were rolling out the English CA&R approach in early 2020, all schools in Malawi were forced to close. Working closely with the MoE and partners, the Abt team quickly pivoted to create ongoing learning opportunities for the country’s six million school children and help maintain progress made through YESA. We provided technical input on the scope, sequence, and scripts of nationwide educational radio programming. Abt also adapted the English and Chichewa literacy remediation activities for at-home use, creating parent resources to boost engagement and offer much-needed support.
Looking ahead to the eventual reopening of schools, Abt consulted with MoE decision makers on appropriate COVID-19 reopening policies and prepared the Ministry to collect learning outcome data to quickly assess and address learning loss.
Real-Time Data for Decision Making – Improving Education Outcomes
Currently, education data collection in Malawi depends on pencils and paper. Data consolidation is slow, and reports are often distributed long after data was collected and are thus immediately outdated—current data is from the 2018/2019 academic year.
In support of the Government of Malawi’s vision to improve children’s performance in reading, Abt has strengthened Malawi’s web-based Education Management Information System (EMIS). This has included expanding EMIS functionality by developing a mobile application that allows for offline data collection and automated data consolidation, analysis, and reporting that is accessible to all education stakeholders.
The new EMIS mobile application will streamline data collection, increase accuracy and timeliness of data, provide efficient data analysis, and increase access to reports at all levels of education. This will enhance decision making and provide feedback on education quality in real time. The Malawian government plans on using the YESA-developed digital data collection and reporting tools in all schools nationwide.
UN Sustainable Development Goals
UN Global Compact Principles
Impact
Results We Generated
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>46,000 teachers trained on newly developed continuous assessment and remediation method
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71,694 teaching and learning materials printed and distributed, including 160 Braille copies
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COVID-19 response implemented to mitigate loss of learning from school shutdowns implemented, including early literacy radio programming and distribution of parent resources
Client & Project
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U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)
Yesani Ophunzira (YESA)
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OUR PEOPLE AND OPERATIONS
Racial Equity
Abt is committed to lifting marginalized voices and addressing structural inequities related to social constructs of race, gender, sexual orientation, and other forms of identity. No matter which corner of the world we find ourselves in, systemically addressing inequity and advancing equitable outcomes is the guiding principle for how we run our company and how we approach our work.
We remain committed to standing with the Black community and doing everything we can to not allow the current focus on these deep-seated issues to subside.
—KATHLEEN FLANAGAN, ABT PRESIDENT & CEO
The murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless others galvanized our organization and our employees to undertake a multi-pronged initiative called Racial Equity at Abt. Through our Reflecting Inward project, we are undertaking an organization-wide assessment of employment policies and practices, as well as employment data and employee experiences, to achieve active anti-racism organizational competency. We are committed to identifying racial inequities that exist in our workplaces, developing a data-driven action plan to address them, and holding ourselves accountable.
Black at Abt, one of the company’s Employee Networking Groups (ENGs), has been a leader in this effort, highlighting the traumas experienced by Black communities and the need to commit to active anti-racism. For example, during Black History Month, Black at Abt collaborated with Abt’s three other ENGs—Well-being at Abt, Emerging Leaders, and PRISM (representing LGBTQIA+ staff)—to organize an externally facilitated collective care series focused on how the body processes traumas stemming from racism, sexism, homophobia, and internalized oppression.
RACIAL EQUITY COLLABORATIVE
Abt is partnering with two Black-led organizations to deepen Abt’s understanding of racial equity while bringing awareness to the organizations’ extensive equity and subject matter expertise. Through this partnership, Abt will elevate the work of the Black-led organizations to help them win projects in sectors where Abt has a strong presence. The Black-led organizations will guide Abt to deepen our equity expertise and foundational knowledge of racial equity and social justice.
Abt Australia’s Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP) has been approved by Reconciliation Australia. This document outlines the actions that Abt Australia will take to work towards achieving Abt’s unique vision for reconciliation. Commitments within the RAP—including measures calling for engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander suppliers—enable Abt to be aspirational and innovative as we gain a deeper understanding of our sphere of influence and establish the best approach to advance reconciliation.
UN Sustainable Development Goals
UN Global Compact Principles
Impact
Launched new paid floating holiday for social impact and community service
Gender Equity
Gender-based inequities, both visible and invisible, are pervasive around the world. This often manifests as disparities in the physical, mental, and economic well-being of women and girls in particular, as well as of people who are transgender or who do not identify as male or female. Such disparities have been shown to have detrimental impacts on families, communities, and even on national and global economies. This context underpins Abt’s commitment to gender equality internally and across our projects.
Understanding Gender & Sex Gender refers to a culturally defined set of economic and social roles, responsibilities, and rights associated with being male, female, non-binary or of other genders. Ideas about gender vary over time, and within and across cultures. Sex is the classification of people at birth as male, female, or intersex based on a combination of bodily characteristics such as chromosomes, hormones, and genitalia.
Two years ago, Abt made a firm commitment to gender equality with the pursuit of certification under Economic Dividends for Gender Equality (EDGE), the leading global assessment methodology and business certification standard for gender equality. Abt was awarded the Assess global certification in 2020. As of June 2021, Abt has been upgraded globally to the second level of EDGE’s three-tier system—Move—for expanding flexible work and organizational culture policies and initiatives that foster greater gender equality. Abt is also one of only three high-scoring companies among 42 private-sector organizations included in the 2021 Global Health 50/50 Report.
Abt offices worldwide help us uphold our organization-wide commitment to gender equality. Recognizing that our program work often brings staff into contact with vulnerable populations, our teams in Papua New Guinea (PNG) developed and implemented action plans and policy toolkits to identify and address risks of gender-based violence—including sexual exploitation, abuse, and harassment—as well as child protection risks. Elsewhere in the region, Abt Australia participated actively in the UN’s 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence activities.
Abt’s projects around the world also maintain our commitment to gender equality. For example, the Abt-led U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative VectorLink Project has advanced women’s empowerment and representation in what has traditionally been male-dominated indoor residual spraying (IRS) activities. The project works with key stakeholders to identify the specific, local barriers to women’s participation in IRS and has implemented several operational changes to address these barriers.
UN Sustainable Development Goals
UN Global Compact Principles
Impact
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Abt is one of only 12 private-sector companies in the U.S. to attain EDGE certification
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Abt U.S. Workforce BY SEX
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47% female
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53% male
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0.01% non-binary
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Abt Australia & Britain Workforce BY SEX
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53% female
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47% male
Global Reporting Initiative Index
OUR COMMUNITIES
Supporting Black-led Organizations
Throughout 2020, Abt employees acted on their commitments to equity by supporting people in their communities who were in need of help. Staff organized a fundraising campaign to support various Black-led organizations working to end homelessness in the United States. Abt matched the $10,000 that employees raised, directing the funds to our 2021 Emerging Impact pro-bono partner, Our House—an organization that provides programs to enrich the lives of children and families experiencing homelessness, and the resources needed to end the cycle of homelessness and poverty.
Abt’s Emerging Impact pro-bono program gives staff the opportunity to develop professionally while serving a mission-aligned non-profit. Abt will support Our House as it creates and implements an action plan to strengthen organizational capacity to provide better quality services and create a sustainable alumni program. In 2020, Abt’s pro-bono partner was Atlanta-based Men Stopping Violence (MSV); Abt employees worked with MSV’s team to develop a high-impact communications plan to advance its crucial mission of ending violence against women.
This didn't feel like pro-bono-quality work. We received excellent counsel, and a fantastic level of care and expertise. The team was top notch.
—Jennifer Jiles, MSV STAFFER
UN Sustainable Development Goals
Impact
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$20K donated to Black-led organizations through employee donations and Abt matching
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23 staff engaged through Emerging Impact program to date
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Over 1,500 hours donated as of 2020
Supporting Youth and Education
FOUNDING MEMBER OF THE MASSACHUSETTS BUSINESS COALITION FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
In 2020, Abt was one of 70 employers to establish the Massachusetts Business Coalition for Early Childhood Education, a campaign to raise awareness of the urgent need for affordable, sustainable childcare. This objective is central to not only the well-being of children, but also to the equity needs of working women, who generally undertake a greater share of domestic and care work in their households. Importantly, the majority of the workforce in the early childcare sector in Massachusetts is made up of women of color—improving working conditions in this sector will therefore have an especially positive impact on women of color in the workforce.
Power Lunch—Advancing Early Literacy Enrichment
Since 2003, staff based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have volunteered for Power Lunch, Boston’s premier early literacy enrichment program for students in grades K–3. Each reading mentor serves as a role model and friend, providing guidance in school while encouraging an enthusiasm for books and reading. Even though COVID-19 made it impossible for mentors and students to meet face-to-face, Abt volunteers continued to show up, using video-enabled conference calls as an opportunity to get staff from other U.S. offices to help as well.
URBAN ALLIANCE—Tooling up High-School Interns
From our office in Rockville, Maryland, Abt supported Urban Alliance’s Montgomery County High School Internship program for the third year. This year, 17 staff members volunteered over three days to train 135 high school interns on basic Excel skills to set them up for success in their internships in the Washington, D.C., metro area. Since the event was remote, we were able to reach and support many more students than originally planned.
UN Sustainable Development Goals
Impact
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Abt is one of 70 employers to establish the Massachusetts Business Coalition for Early Childhood Education
Power Lunch Impact FY21:
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15 volunteers across 2 office locations
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360 hours donated
Urban Alliance Support FY21:
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17 volunteers
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39 hours donated
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135 students trained in Excel skills
