Women Enterprise Fund To Reach 200,000 Beneficiaries Through Deployed Personnel

The Women Enterprise Fund (WEF) will provide support to 200,000 women across all 47 counties in 2020. The enterprise fund program through about 300 of its support personnel will provide entrepreneurship training and access to capital investment.

The trainers, a majority of them under 30 years of age, have been equipped with techniques and methodologies for conducting an effective training, particularly for adult learners, on the policy and structures of WEF, and a practical appreciation of the WEF manual which covers record-keeping skills, marketing and promotion of businesses, financial literacy, business plan development among other skills.

The training is part of a joint economic empowerment program between WEF and Coca-Cola Central, East and West Africa Ltd’s 5by20 initiative. From Coca-Cola’s perspective, women form a central pillar of its sustainability agenda which is linked to their 5by20 effort to economically empower five million women globally by 2020. In Kenya, the partnership targets to empower one million women. The program is rooted in the two institutions’ shared interest in creating a conducive environment that enables women to build sustainable businesses.

In 2019, 161,415 women benefitted from the training, bringing the total number of beneficiaries supported through this partnership that was established in 2014 to 718,550. The program aims to address and remove barriers that women may experience in creating economic opportunities. Participants receive business skills training, access to financial services and business club mentoring.

“Entrepreneurship training helps sustain businesses especially in the SME sector where 80 percent of them do not survive beyond three years. It is our priority, therefore, to reduce this through capital and knowledge investment,” said WEF Head of SME Training Collins Okoth.

According to Homabay County Trainer, Jaspers Gadafi, the ongoing training of trainers’ workshop helps equip them with knowledge plus skills to help women make informed decisions besides realizing their self-worth. Since its inception, WEF has been able to train up to 1,319,660 million women to run successful businesses and disbursed over Ksh 17 billion in loans to women-run enterprises.

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