Lightening the load / Globally, women and girls currently spend anywhere between three to six hours a day on unpaid care work (ie, cooking and cleaning) – a large proportion of which goes unrecognised. Meanwhile, on average, men spend between half an hour to two hours. The knock-on effect of this disproportionate responsibility not only impacts women’s social lives, but also the opportunities to pursue an education or earn a living. Despite the Mastercard Index of Women’s Advancement, which measures women’s participation in employment, citing the Philippines as a country continuously pushing gender equality, household work (including laundry) is still largely seen as a female responsibility. This is the uphill battle that Surf has been fighting since 2017.
In May of that year, Surf launched a three-year global partnership with Oxfam with the aim to empower women around the world to ‘earn a living, participate in public life and pursue an education’, according to the press release. However, the issue of supporting female entrepreneurship in the Philippines has become even more pressing following the Covid-19 pandemic, with female business owners being disproportionately affected by the health crisis. According to a report by the International Finance Corp, a sister organisation of the World Bank, sales of women-owned online businesses in the Philippines shrank by 27% in 2020. The report also added that women-led businesses in the Philippines could better compete if they had the necessary skills in digital selling, as well as access to credit. Here, Surf is stepping up on the skills front, picking up on its association with empowering women and creating some positive brand associations in the process.
As Roman Olivarez, ECD at MullenLowe Treyna, told Contagious: ‘The best way to be of service to consumers is to empower them with the tools they need to succeed in life. Whether that’s just a bang-for-your-buck detergent or a brand that helps level the playing field in terms of opportunities.’
A perfect pair / By partnering with FHM, the largest digital group for entrepreneurial stay-at-home mothers in the Philippines (it has over 370,000 members), Surf adds credibility to its initiative. FHM’s founder, Maria Korina Bertulfo, is a working mother herself and the non-profit has worked with a number of academic organisations to push female education and economic advancement. For example, in 2021, when Eskwelabs, an online data upskilling school, launched its mobile-based data literacy programme, it marketed it through FHM. Not to mention the partnership between FHM and Connected Women, a Singapore-based group focused on educating women about the digital economy. Tactically, Surf is harnessing the organisation’s expertise and consequently increasing its odds of engaging its target audience and delivering quality content that actually has value.
