Mentorship Toolkit for Women
in the Gig Economy

The Mentorship Toolkit is a practical guide developed from the Gig Economy Project’s experience implementing mentorship and peer learning programmes across Africa and Asia. Developed in collaboration with 21CC Education, it is designed for implementing agencies, education providers, training institutions, and other organisations that want to strengthen women’s participation in the gig economy by making mentorship and peer learning a core part of their strategies.

The toolkit brings together key lessons, practical tools, and adaptable templates in one place, making it easier for organisations to design and run their own programmes. It is built to be flexible, locally relevant, and reflective, while also encouraging knowledge sharing across geographies.

The toolkit includes voices from the field, stories and insights that highlight the power of relationships, trust, and lived experience in building stronger mentorship initiatives for gig women workers.

Mentorship works to empower women in the gig economy, and we have a proven framework ready to be used. Our Toolkit is designed to make implementation simple and practical for institutions, while ensuring long term impact.

Its aim is to provide implementing agencies, training institutions, and other organisations with the resources to build their own localised and successful mentorship programme. Instead of spending time and resources designing a programme from scratch, the toolkit does the heavy lifting by giving you a structure, resources, and tested approaches, that shorten the learning curve. It saves you time, reduces costs, and increases the chances of success.

The Mentorship Toolkit is modular, flexible, and designed to be adapted to your local context. You can read it cover to cover or simply use the sections that are most helpful for your needs. Take what fits, change what doesn’t, and add your own voice. The stories and templates inside are suggested as starting points, not rules. The more local and contextual your mentorship programme becomes, the more powerful its impact will be.

It covers five key implementation phases:

1. Outreach and selection
   Guidance on how to anchor your programme in the local ecosystem.
2. Preparation
   All the key bits and pieces to put together before any mentorship programme can start: selection criteria, matching of mentors and mentees, determining the right delivery format, tips for localisation, how to navigate incentives, among others.
3. Implementation for Mentors
   Practical tips and session formats to train mentors and help them prepare to share knowledge, build trust, and support women in gig work.
4. Implementation for Mentees
   Offers resources to strengthen mentees’ confidence, skills, and peer networks through interactive and participatory methods.
5. Evaluation and Anchoring
   Approaches and examples for assessing results, capturing learning, reporting strategies and ensuring mentorship sustainability in the long term.

These sections outline a suggested pathway, but the Toolkit is designed to be flexible. You are invited to choose, adapt, or combine sections in the way that best fits your context.

Our Toolkit is designed for a wide range of institutions that want to strengthen women’s participation in the gig economy, such as implementing agencies, education and training providers, entrepreneurship hubs, and community organisations. It has been created with a special focus on the realities of women in the Global South, where barriers to digital work are often higher and the potential for impact is equally strong.

In addition to these institutions, it benefits both mentors and mentees. Mentors gain structured tools to share knowledge, build trust, and support women’s journeys in the digital work. Mentees develop skills, confidence, and peer networks that help them navigate platforms and build a community of care.

At the heart of the Mentorship Toolkit is a gender-responsive lens. Women’s pathways into and through gig work are shaped by factors like age, disability, location, education, marital status, and household roles. Building on our experience, we have learned that mentorship can respond to all these barriers, by acknowledging that it is not about one person having all the answers, but about co-creating solutions, nurturing trust, and building a community of care.

Peer learning strengthens this by anchoring the programme in the power of shared experience: when women see each other succeed, ask questions, or lead sessions, they are more likely to stay engaged, ask for support, and imagine a wider range of possibilities for themselves. We believe success should also be measured in terms of agency, confidence, and the ability to make informed choices, all of which a gender responsive approach mentorship programme can provide.

The Toolkit addresses the specific gender barriers that keep women from thriving in the gig economy and taps into the institutions promoting gender transformation. We believe that using our Toolkit to implement mentorship programmes means you are not just delivering training, but creating pathways for long-term participation, community building, and impact on women gig workers.

We believe a mentorship programme should have a holistic impact on the ecosystem.

• For mentors and mentees, mentorship opens doors to skills, confidence, and peer support that make digital work easier to navigate.
• For institutions, it provides ready-to-use tools to design, implement, and evaluate programmes that go beyond pilots and become lasting offers.
• For the ecosystem, it strengthens networks of solidarity, knowledge-sharing, and gender-responsive practices in the gig economy.

Furthermore, the Toolkit’s evaluation and anchoring section is designed to make impact tangible and ensures the programme leaves lasting change within institutions and communities.