Women Economic Empowerment

The UN Women Liberia Women’s Economic Empowerment pillar works to secure women’s livelihoods and rights in the context of sustainable development. The section implements programmes and projects that contribute to improved food and nutrition security; increased income to secure livelihoods; enhanced leadership and participation in institutions and in shaping laws, policies and programmes; and a gender responsive policy environment for the economic empowerment of women and girls.

The UN Women Women’s Economic Empowerment section is currently supporting work on:

1.    Innovation for gender equality through strategic partnership with private sector. In this context, the Country Office is engaged in leveraging digital inclusion for the economic empowerment and the resilience to disasters of rural women smallholders and women entrepreneurs through:

a)    Digital Inclusion for women’s economic empowerment
Improved access to markets and learning opportunities through consolidation and scale up of the Buy from Women initiative, with a focus on the platform operationalization, as well as trainings, marketing and other activities to facilitate women’s access to the platform.

b)    Digital Inclusion for women’s resilience to disasters
Improved access to disaster risk reduction, risk transfer and finance by enhancing scope to include mobile-enabled disaster, health and life insurance, weather forecast and alerts and climate-smart agricultural advisory on the Buy from Women digital platform.

c)    Digital Inclusion for women’s access to and promotion of renewable energy
Improved access to energy for household and productive purposes, including through PAYGO solar asset financing and strengthening women’s skills in the energy sector.

2.    Delivery of a comprehensive, sequenced ‘package’ of core interventions to support women’s economic and social empowerment - through a combination of direct implementation and on-the-ground coordination with other community-level programming, namely:

a)    Social norm change – engaging men and boys and community leaders and building the capacity of grassroots women’s leaders and organisations in order to challenge and change attitudes and behavior towards women, their value, roles and responsibilities.
b)    Literacy and numeracy training for women and adolescent girls, especially the most vulnerable
c)    Business development and management skills
d)    Access to sustainable finance for women through further expansions of the SLA approach and working on access to finance for agriculture.
e)    Social safety nets / social protection for vulnerable women and girls
f)    Agricultural development – women’s access to land, credit, agricultural inputs and services