1. Introduction Women’s economic empowerment (WEE) has gained focus in the past decade as an essential component to achieving women’s human rights as well as key development goals, such as reduced poverty, higher education, improved child and maternal health, increased welfare and economic growth. However, women’s labour force participation has stagnated, and unequal access to educational and economic opportunities persists in many countries. As WEE continues to grow as a priority of economic development programming, including through the German G7 Initiative on Women’s Economic Empowerment (2015) and as a focus area of BMZ’s Gender Equality Strategy (2014), practitioners are gaining experience in how to effectively monitor and measure outcomes. This has created a deeper understanding of the complexity of empowerment, and acknowledgement that the impacts of private sector development programmes on women and girls cannot be understood simply through sex-disaggregated data. This report presents findings from a pilot study using a qualitative Rapid Assessment tool, one of several tools that would be needed for integrating household-level indicators of WEE into results measurement systems per the DCED guidelines. A Rapid Assessment is used to generate indications of where the project is having significant results among a pre-selected population understood to have benefitted from the project, and can be useful at various stages to see what is working. The Sector Project on Innovative Approaches to Private Sector Development of Deutsche Gesellschaft für internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) commissioned the report on behalf of the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). It synthesizes findings from in-depth interviews conducted with women beneficiaries of projects in Egypt and Morocco, and provides a preliminary understanding of household-level results of BMZ-funded women’s economic empowerment activities for women who had experienced some aspect of economic empowerment. It provides insight into how and why they experienced changes within their households, as well as on unanticipated effects that can only be captured through qualitative research. The purpose of the report is as follows: qq To present findings from in-depth interviews conducted with 18 women involved in different economic empowerment projects in the MENA region (Egypt and Morocco). qq To identify how and why household-level changes have taken place for selected women beneficiaries, with a focus on the indicators suggested in the DCED Guidelines.1 qq To present detailed success stories that demonstrate the potential impact of having a job or additional income on the living conditions of women at a household level. qq To provide recommendations to GIZ/BMZ on how activities promoting women’s economic empowerment can be imp