This article highlights why the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has focused on financial inclusion to advance women's economic empowerment and drive progress on gender equality. It highlights key lessons from financial inclusion-related projects the foundation has supported within the "Putting Women and Girls at the Center of Development (WGCD) Grand Challenge" in 2015. The article also shares the logic and research informing the foundation's strategy to close the gender gap in financial inclusiona key pillar of its strategy on women's economic empowermentand improve the lives and livelihoods of millions of women around the world. ARTICLE HISTORY

As national governments roll out COVID response plans, an opportunity arises to re-cast adolescent girls’ programs to centrally anchor them on girls’ voices, leadership, ambitions, and assets in development policies and programs. Drawing together the evidence on what we know works for adolescent girls, as well as the growing literature on positive strengths-based programming which are gradually and increasingly being applied, this commentary calls for a girl-intentional approach to policy and programming. A girl-intentional approach is described through 3 case studies, which illustrate the additionality of new or improved adolescent knowledge, skills, and competencies; improved opportunities for adolescent engagement, voice, and agency; improved community safety and support; stronger, healthier relationships; and stronger and healthier norms, attitudes, values, and goals. The case studies describe program hooks that facilitate operationalization, point to measurable outcomes, and identify opportunities for scale, including the re-opening of schools. Overall, inter-sectoral solutions that address the myriad of issues affecting an adolescent girl’s life and tackle pervasive gender inequities require greater emphasis by development actors and national governments.

This study examines the extent to which a company's fair trade reputation, and the fit between this reputation and the company's communicated fair trade message, influences consumer scepticism and positive electronic word-of-mouth. The results of two experiments show that a previous fair trade reputation has a direct and indirect effect, via consumer brand identification, on consumer scepticism. Moreover, the fit between the reputation and the communicated message seems to affect scepticism only when the communicated message is perceived as realistic. In industries with poor fair trade reputations (Study 1), the fit does not seem to have an effect on scepticism, while the fit influences scepticism in industries with a certain reputation history for fair trade (Study 2). Scepticism and consumer brand identification play an important mediating role in the relation among reputation, fit and consumers' electronic word-of-mouth intentions. Therefore, we conclude that communicating fair trade initiatives not only can be a rewarding effort but also seems to be a delicate matter.

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