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AWOMI’s third program, the Women Empowerment Fund (WEFU) is the corollary activity of the ACT and YOWLI. The WEFU serves as a funding program to post YOWLI identified initiatives and also promotes income generating opportunities for women at the local level. Following the month long YOWLI training AWOMI selects a few of the best YOWLI proposals that link implementation of the ACT to Advocacy and social mobilization and provides support to the YOWLI groups through a partner mentoring organization.
The WEFU has also enabled numerous women’s organizations to access seed money for implementing the ACT while enhancing their income earning activities. The WEFU is the vehicle that allows these economic actors to understand the place of their activities in the production chain of the sector and identify policy challenges that they can use in their advocacy for demanding change as well as increased budgetary allocations for their activity. The WEFU proves to be an innovative initiative in the sense that most financing to income generating activities do not integrate a research or advocacy dimension like the ACT. The WEFU is a catalyst for women understanding where is the money, which controls resources and decision making and how they can engage with them to ask for a more equitable distribution of the national and local budget.
Under this grant AWOMI has implemented the WEFU and supported women’s organizations in West Africa linking it ACT mechanism, gender, advocacy communication techniques and gender responsive budgeting. By linking macroeconomic policies which determine the budget to women’s realities and living conditions, the WEFU program went beyond providing seed money to empowering women to demand accountability from their government. By building the capacity of women to better organize and their advocacy skills, AWOMI through this grant positioned women in local election processes and accompanied them until they women a considerable number of seats as city counselors. These women rural counselors are now sitting in different committees such as water, health, and land management committees.
The objective of the WEFU is:
• To enable women to identify and articulate violations of their economic and social rights,
• To build evidence on lived experiences regarding the different manifestations economic and social rights violations,
• To support economic opportunities initiatives that women can manage and monitor on their own
• To develop an accountability scorecard on the basis of women’s assessment on economic and social rights and evidence collected by AWOMI and its other partners
• To put pressure on international, financial and trade institutions to deliver on economic and social rights and poverty elimination commitments,
The WEFU is a small grant initiative that puts resources in the hands of women to enable them to strengthen their citizen’s rights and participate in building democratic development. It WEFU may add value to what other organizations are doing by contributing to support economic education, advocacy capacity, translations of economic and social rights policy instruments and agreements, constituency building. The WEFU may also provide support to groups that need seed money to start an economic activity that can be linked to policy analysis.
This program could contribute in enabling women and their organizations to make a qualitative leap into local mobilization for policy change, equity in revenue collection and resource allocation. Accountability can be demanded through many different means, including monitoring, reporting, litigation, public debate and political participation. Accountability should go beyond pressure on Governments and extend its focus to non-state actors like corporations, international financial institutions, civil society groups.
Monitoring public policy from a gender equality and human rights point of view is an effective accountability campaign that WEFU beneficiaries can undertake using results fro the accountability scorecard. They can pinpoint areas where their governments fail in meeting their economic and social rights. Women can monitor sectors where resources are not being used to generate maximum effect and where resources need to be redistributed to meet economic and social needs. Women can use gender-sensitive indicators to determine the improvements needed in the budget to make it more responsive to the needs of women. They can organize budget education to engage and make the process as participatory as possible and utilize key feminist decision-makers.
WEFU beneficiaries can also organize tribunals in order to articulate violations of their economic and social rights and to demand restitution and compensation for violations.
Project Activities and Methodology
AWOMI is working with its national NGO partners in countries identified below. These NGOs select 3 community level women’s groups that could be interested in and eligible for applying to the WEFU. AWOMI selection committee will identify from each country group of proposals the best suited for WEFU. AWOMI will sign and MOU with the national NGO sponsoring organization that will also be part of the policy mobilization process. Criteria for selection may include but is not limited to the following:
• Work experience in fighting poverty among women and youth at local level,
• Ability to organize and build a coalition around issues related to economic and social empowerment of women or the MDGs,
• Potential to direct mobilization towards national policy reform and demanding for accountability,
• Potential to organize for local mobilization to influence resource allocation and policy change,
• Capacity to articulate issues and ability to lead and mobilize others,
• Potential for strengthening advocacy around economic and social policies,
• Linkage and support by an institution that will provide backstopping and support to the activity,
• Ability to utilize funds efficiently to implement innovative activity that reinforce income opportunities and promote organizing and mobilization,
• Ability to be innovative in using media to mobilize and influence.
The selected women’s community based group works with advice from the national NGO and support from AWOMI to implement the activity. It is expected that this approach will generate a multi level policy engagement from local to national to regional with ramification at all levels. This approach sets up from the outset bottom up participatory mechanisms that will create a solid foundation for movement building and accountability tracking. The following countries are involved in the WEFU:
• Rwanda
• Zambia
• Mauritania
• Mali
• Ghana
• Senegal
• Democratic Republic of Congo
• Namibia
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