21/7/2022
PWC’s Women Economic Empowerment interventions support pastoralist women to become self-reliant. One way we do this is through our Women Solidarity Bomas (WSBs). These are a homestead settings where women are 100% responsible for tending the collectively-owned cattle and economic empowerment programs which aim to address gender inequality, poverty and marginalisation of women by enabling them to become self-reliant, strengthen women solidarity and change the negative societal attitude that women cannot manage livestock. The number of cattle at the Mondorosi women’s solidarity boma increased to 140 with the birth of new calves. The additional healthy calves help to ensure the continuity of the livestock revolving fund supporting vulnerable women in the community. The income earned from selling sheep in the future will improve the members households’ incomes.
We continue supporting young pastoralist women graduates of our Energize programme. This past quarter, PWC conducted a training facilitated by our partners SOMO Africa (https://www.somoafrica.org/) on their revolutionary DigiKua platform for 20 young pastoralist women. Digikua is a platform that allows businesses to record their transactions in real-time. The training took the Training of Trainers (ToT) format, allowing the young women who received the training to teach it to other women. The Energise ladies engaged use the skills they developed during our programme to start up small businesses. Further, they committed to reaching 30 other women and training them on using the platform to enhance their own businesses.
We have also continued to sensitise women to form or join existing Village Community Banks (VICOBA) groups and sharing our methodology and learning on women’s economic empowerment at various meetings workshops and seminars.