The American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative-led Women and Girls Empowered (WAGE) consortium, funded by the U.S. Department of State Secretary’s Office of Global Women's Issues, is pleased to announce its new initiative ‘Women Entrepreneurs in Northern Ghana Gain Access to Integrated Services via Agent Networks’ (WE GAIN) program. The 24- month WAGE WE GAIN initiative is led by the Grameen Foundation in close partnership with ABA ROLI and local civil society organizations (CSOs) RISE Ghana, Ghana Developing Communities Association (GDCA), and the HealthKeepers Network (HKN). The initiative’s resource partners include Mobile Telecommunications Networks (MTN) Ghana.
Despite Ghana’s rise to lower middle-income status, rural households, especially those in Northern and upper Eastern districts (collectively, ‘northern Ghana’), experience high poverty rates and economic exclusion. While micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in northern Ghana have the potential to increase employment opportunities for northern women and youth, they remain vulnerable due to multiple intersecting shocks and stressors including:
Women have limited access to a range of formal financial services which prevents them from obtaining the investment capital they need to start new businesses, to grow them, or to improve their resilience. Thirty eight percent of women in Ghana have an account at a bank or at other financial institutions, and only 10% have access to credit from a formal institution.
Women operating agricultural enterprises have limited access to quality agricultural inputs and equipment. This results in low yields, high post-harvest losses, and weakened ability to respond to climate change.
Harmful gender norms and gender-based violence (GBV) risks (27% of women experience physical GBV and 34% experience sexual GBV) has led to the creation of GBV response referral networks that are mandated by the government. However, in rural Northern Ghana, these referral networks are weak and support services are often costly and hard to reach.
Health emergencies like malaria and COVID-19, as well as other income shocks caused by climate change, divert women’s income flows and make it hard for them to maintain their businesses.
Female heads of households, women in polygynous households, child brides, widows, ‘head porters’ (migrant young women and girls that are hired to carry goods in the markets), and landless women are particularly vulnerable to the combined effects of poverty, health insecurity, and GBV. Even though many experienced organizations across Northern Ghana are working to address these issues, the services they provide are often gender-blind, siloed, underfunded, and/or unsustainable.
To address these challenges, the WAGE WE GAIN initiative will build the capacity of RISE Ghana, GDCA, and HKN existing community agents to start micro mobile money businesses to deliver an integrated, market-based, high-impact package of financial and non-financial information, products, services, and referrals (Digital Financial Services plus - DFS+). These services will be delivered through MTN’s DFS platform and a complementary digital learning platform thereby increasing the sustainable access of women entrepreneurs in northern Ghana to a range of financial, health, GBV and other critical services they need to achieve personal and business growth and resilience.
The WAGE WE GAIN initiative is currently conducting a barriers and opportunities assessment to identify the barriers faced by female entrepreneurs in starting and growing successful businesses. The assessment will also identify opportunities to address said barriers through DFS+ products and services, GBV prevention and referrals, and business information services to be offered by the project. The assessment findings will be shared with key public, private and CSO stakeholders in Northern Ghana to introduce a set of new services that effectively leverage DFS and GBV prevention/referrals for women’s empowerment.