WOMEN FOR SMALL BUSINESS

SUMMARY

EFA Cameroon through a pilot project “Women for Small Business” (WOSB) is engaged to empower vulnerable women and young girls in a bit to reduce gender inequalities among men and women. The main objective is to assist at least 1000 vulnerable women and girls out of financial dependency through small business schemes in communities of Diamare Division, Far North region of Cameroon. And specifically, to: i- reduce the women and young girls’ dependency vis-a-vis their spouses ; ii- increase beneficiaries’ revenue through income generating activities ;iii- reinforce women rights to lucrative activities of their choices; and iv- stimulate feminine creative potentials in the wealth creation processes.

Activities Realize

1-      Discussion with women to check their progress and impact of the activity.

2-      Site visits for first hand results on progress of businesses and individual challenges encountered.

Results

-          Routine meetings were regular and each group member respected loaning and refund terms.

-          A group member was replaced with after unanimous agreement of all members.

-          Agreed on coordinating with the women of Palar and Gakley to acquire a uniform at their convenience.

Human Interest Story

Damaris is beneficiary whose business has grown with time thanks to the loan she receives as capital base. She testified “before the being selected, I use to buy very small quantity of food items to sell without any reasonable profit. But since we began with the WOSB project, I now buy in large quantities (cereals in bags of 125kg at a go…) I have added all three species of sorghum, fresh milk, bread, kolanuts, seasonings…. My greatest achievement is the construction of my house where I live with my 09 kids whom I single handedly cater for after being abandoned by my husband. I call on other women to get out of suffering and empower themselves financially so that their children especially the girls will not suffer. I am grateful to EFA Cameroon and GlobalGiving for reducing my suffering and I hop they can do more to help more women in our community. 04 of my children are in school and I can take care of my old mum thanks to this WOSB activity. God bless you all."

Project Impact

Group members showed a change in mentality and demonstrated a high degree of empowerment and because of this, the community including men were becoming more relaxed about the empowerment of women. This was a great milestone towards gender equality in the Far North Region Cameroon where the gender gap had been significantly wide for the past decades.  

Lessons Learnt

More sensitizations and orientation on activities need to be done on business ideas and items or income generating activities in order to guide women who sell seasonal items. This is to avoid sales of items that could be detrimental to human and environmental health.

Continuity

Monthly supervision of activities across 05 communities to follow-up and evaluate the progress of women as groups and individuals while counting on the continual support of GlobalGiving to reach out to 1000 vulnerable women whose suffering has been exasperated by security crisis and COVID-19 pandemic.