GOVERNMENT is optimistic that the implementation of the Girls Education and Women’s Empowerment and Livelihood (GEWEL) Project will assist in addressing challenges faced by women and girls.
Gender Division Permanent Secretary, Mainga Kabika says women and girls have continued to be marginalized in the economic, political, cultural and social development process of national development.
Ms Kabika notes that the GEWEL project was aimed at increasing access to livelihood support for women and access to secondary education for disadvantaged adolescent’s girls in extremely poor households in selected districts.
ZANIS reports that Ms Kabika said this when she paid a courtesy call on Muchinga Province Permanent Secretary during the monitoring and evaluation of the GEWEL project in the region.
She explained that beneficiaries of the project are drawn from the social cash transfer households.
Ms Kabika explained that the GEWEL project has so many components with one being supporting business and life skills training, monitoring, peer support, productivity grants and facilitation of savings groups for 129,400 women.
She noted that Keeping Girls in Schools (KGS) aims to support 43,520 adolescents’ girls in extremely poor households to access secondary education, adding that this component is implemented by the ministry of education.
Ms Kabika added that institutional strengthening and system building are the components that support the government to build a single registry for selection of beneficiaries to improve targeting accuracy while improving synergies across programs.
She stated that Social Cash Transfer (SCT) was a new subcomponent that was providing direct financing to the government’s social cash transfer program to cover approximately 245.000 people up to the year 2024.
Ms Kabika noted that the Gender Division was mandated to coordinate the implementation of the GEWEL project and continues to perform the monitoring and evaluation functions as a means of providing oversight of the project.
She noted that the main objective of the evaluation exercise was to appreciate progress achieved, bottlenecks and challenges that the GEWEL projects may be facing in the district.
“Whilst in the province my team and will visit Chinsali Nakonde Mpika, and Lavushimanda Districts, she said.
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