Women empowerment has emerged as a critical issue in development and economics. Economic empowerment empowers women by allowing them to control and benefit from resources, assets and income.
It also improves women’s well-being and their ability to manage risk which can lead to approach in support of trivialised genders in a specific political or social context.
It can be defined in a variety of ways, including accepting women’s perspectives or making an effort to seek them, and elevating women’s status through education, awareness, literacy and training.
Women’s empowerment empowers and allows women to make life-changing decisions in the face of societal problems.
They may be able to redefine gender roles or other such roles, which may give them more freedom to pursue desired goals.
While the terms are frequently used interchangeably, the more comprehensive concept of gender empowerment applies to people of any gender, emphasising the distinction between biological and gender as role.
Women’s empowerment improves women’s status through literacy, education, training, and awareness-raising.
Furthermore, women’s empowerment refers to women’s ability to make strategic life decisions that were previously unavailable to them.
The implementation of programmes and policies based on the concept of female empowerment may benefit nations, businesses, communities and groups. It also improves the quality and quantity of human resources available for development.
When it comes to human rights and development, empowerment is one of the most important procedural concerns.
Women’s economic empowerment programmes have been in place in Kenya for a long time.
However, there is no data available to show how successful they have been.
Kenyatta University launched the Women’s Economic Empowerment (KU-WEE) hub early last year.
The project operating under the Centre for Gender Equity and Empowerment’s initiative: ‘What Works for Women’s Economic Empowerment’ aims to build evidence on gender equality to guide policymakers and others when formulating transformative policies on women’s empowerment in Kenya.
“Women’s representation in the economy is marred by poor gender representation at the policy decision-making levels.
Lack of clarity in policies to address workforce segregation while existing programmes and policies have not been independently evaluated are some of the rationales towards the programme,” says Prof Judith Ndombi Waudo, the hub leader.
Ndombi further states that the establishment of the hub was informed by the need for gender data and robust evidence that informs WEE architecture in Kenya and the Eastern Africa region.
“The goal of the hub is to build programme and policy evidence on “What Works” to advance and scale-up WEE in Kenya through research and innovation.
This evidence will be used to shape policies, programmes, interventions and advocacy efforts related to supporting WEE in Kenya,” she said.
Women’s Roles in the Public and Private Sectors; Skilling and Mentoring; and Violence, Crisis, and Women’s Work are the three pillars of the research.
Its goal is to increase women’s engagement and influence in all sectors of the economy, to increase women’s employability through training, internships and skilling, to prevent and reduce sexual and gender-based violence, and to secure women’s empowerment and agency, as well as to build women’s economic empowerment indices to track progress in empowering women.
The primary goals of this project are to increase the representation of women in leadership positions, corporate governance and the manufacturing sector, as well as to cut gender-based violence in half by 2025.
Aside from that, at least four gender-responsive policies must be implemented by 2025 to protect women and communities from unexpected socioeconomic shocks.
