WEM builds the capacity of low-income women in income generating activities so that they are able to participate and make decisions at the household levels and the community at large
WEM links the lack of economic empowerment among women to the current development challenges such as gender-based violence; education (quality, access, dropout rates, retention), corruption, maternal mortality among others.
WEM has three approaches to women’s economic empowerment:
- Building capacity of the women in agriculture for both household food security and household income, by working with women farmer groups. We train then in agriculture education, provide some inputs and link them to relevant services like agriculture training centres and marketing groups
- Building entrepreneurship skills among the women and encouraging the women to work in groups so as to save and be loanable. We do this by training the women in entrepreneurship skills and encourage them to save as a group then we train them on how to manage their savings and lending activities.
- Enhancing adult learning and skills development so that the women are able to negotiate, participate and make informed decisions in all aspects of their social, political and economic lives. We do know that low levels of education is the major hindrance to empowerment of women and therefore we use participatory methods to enhance literacy levels among the women so that they are able to engage in their businesses and also make decisions that benefit their families.
In all these WEM works closely with likeminded organizations for building coalition for advocacy, capacity building and lobbying for certain policy change. WEM also identifies key policy and cultural issues that affect the economic empowerment of women and engages key stakeholders to advocate for gender friendly policies.