A thematic review of skill development for women’s empowerment and sustainable livelihoods under SDG 5 and SDG 8

Abstract Skill development and capacity-building programmes for women occupy the ground where SDG 5 (Gender Equality) and SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) meet. The two goals are linked in structure, as the success of one is essential to the success of the other, and the evidence from skill-based interventions on middle- to long-term livelihood outcomes for women has been developing in different disciplines such as development economics, gender studies, and agricultural research, each addressing a part of the question, but none addressing the whole. That evidence is brought together in this review. The search was carried out using the guidance provided by PRISMA 2020 and Scopus was used as the search database; this is a limitation as it was decided to only use one search database. It returned 3,841 records. Deduplication and language filtering left 2,614 for title and abstract screening, of which 1,161 proceeded to full-text assessment. Sixty-three studies satisfied every pre-specified criterion; six were subsequently removed at re-screening, yielding a final corpus of 57 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2005 and 2022. Quality was appraised using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool, supplemented by five adapted criteria for designs outside its empirical scope. Ten thematic clusters were identified: vocational training and labour market outcomes; digital skills and technology-mediated empowerment; microfinance, financial inclusion and agency; entrepreneurship and self-employment; self-help group and cooperative models; rural livelihoods and agriculture; gender-responsive policy frameworks; decent work quality and SDG 8 alignment; SDG 5–SDG 8 interlinkages and synergies; and structural barriers and constraints. The synthesis indicates that integrated, multi-component programmes are associated with stronger empowerment and livelihood outcomes than standalone skills training. The review contributes an integrated four-level conceptual framework mapping skill development inputs, empowerment pathways, livelihood outcomes and policy moderators explicitly to specified SDG 5 and SDG 8 targets.