KENYATTA UNIVERSITY has received a grant from BILL & MELINDA GATES FOUNDATION to establish Women’s Economic Empowerment (KU-WEE) Hub. The KU-WEE Hub Project aims to ensure that interested parties such as relevant ministries and departments, county governments ,policy leaders (legislators and policy makers) implementing agencies and donors utilize empirical evidence to implement and shape policies, programs, interventions, and advocacy efforts related to supporting women’s economic empowerment (WEE) in Kenya. The project is focusing on three thematic areas :
- Women’s Roles in the Public and Private Sectors;
- Women’s Skilling and Mentoring;
- Violence, Crisis, and Women’s Work.
The primary outcomes envisioned to be achieved by 2025 through application of the evidence generated by eleven evaluation studies to be carried out under the project are:
To increase by 30%:
Representation of women in management and leadership positions within the public and private sectors.
Women participation in corporate governance in public and private companies.
Proportion of women-owned and managed enterprises within the manufacturing sector.
The program targets to improve exposure of girls and women to 20% in:
Transferable skills and transited to work by 2025
Apprenticeship and mentorship programs to enhance their work readiness
Lifelong learning programs to enhance their skills for economic self-empowerment.
Ensure reduced sexual and gender-based violence prevalence by 50% at least in four gender responsive policies implemented to protect women and communities against sudden adverse socio-economic shocks.
The diversity and quality of women livelihoods (market participation and productivity) increased by 20% in at least five counties by 2025.
A new women economic empowerment measurement index constructed and demonstrated
A new gender responsive budgeting tool developed and shared with stakeholders
The project, activities to be completed include:
Undertake analytical studies that will involve impact evaluations in the thematic areas:
- Women’s Roles in the Public and Private Sectors;
- Women’s Skilling and Mentoring;
- Violence, Crisis, and Women’s Work.
Impact evaluation in one of the thematic areas, using Randomized Control Trials (RCT) to generate evidence on causal relationships and the effectiveness of a promising intervention to improve WEE.
Stakeholder engagement. This involves national-level policy dialogues to discuss evidence and constraints, involving policymakers as well as citizens and civil society groups so that a range of informed stakeholder groups can come together to advocate for evidence-based policy making.
Capacity building to ensure that strong institutions and networks emerge and are available to partner with governments and others on evidence generation for WEE.
Advocacy and Communications strategy: The Gates Foundation media partner will train researchers in advocacy and communications strategy in the following areas: packaging of research evidence for media; effective policy communications and advocacy; modes of communicating evidence effectively; how evidence needs to be packaged in order to be most impactful.