Women's Economic Empowerment Kenya

Duration: 2021 to 2026Cocoa and Cocoa Products, Coffee, Fish and Seafood, Fresh Fruit and Vegetables, Grains, Pulses and Oilseeds, Natural Food Additives, Natural Ingredients for Cosmetics, Natural Ingredients for Health Products, Processed Fruit and Vegetables and Edible Nuts, Spices and Herbs, Apparel, Home Decoration and Home Textiles, Outsourcing (ITO/BPO), TourismKenya

As part of CBI's 2023-2025 strategy, this is the first project with gender as a starting point instead of a specific sector in a particular country. CBI developed this project to contribute to the creation of decent jobs for women, promote female entrepreneurship, and enhance the role of women in management positions. This project focuses on Kenya.

Project details

In Kenya, women entrepreneurs face many issues. These include, but are not limited to:

Lack of skills and knowledge;
Difficulty accessing networks, information, finance and services;
Policy, rules and regulations: most women-owned businesses are not registered; and
Working conditions.

This project aims to empower women entrepreneurs and employees. It will do this by improving the availability of gender-specific support services. This will result in business growth, increased exports to the European Union (EU) and regional markets, and more decent employment opportunities for women.

Aims

Specifically, this project aims to:

Improve access to finance and related services for women entrepreneurs;
Improve access to markets and related services for women entrepreneurs;
Improve gender-responsive service delivery for grassroots women entrepreneurs;
Deliver a functional Women's Economic Empowerment ecosystem with a unified voice to promote exports from women-led enterprises; and
Improve the sustainability practices of women-led enterprises.

To achieve these goals, the project focuses on:

Increased coordination in the women's economic empowerment (WEE) ecosystem;
Improved, gender-responsive service delivery for women entrepreneurs;
Improved lobby and advocacy;
Business export coaching for 'missing middle' women-owned businesses; and
Support for extra pilot projects that contribute to business growth (export) and decent job creation.

Project participants

For this project, we will work with frontrunners and women-led SMEs from various sectors in Kenya. At the moment, we are still in the design and selection process.