ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT

Maboshe Memorial Centre (MMC) supports social micro-enterprise program to empower impoverished young women and caregivers for children with disabilities to break out of the vicious cycle of poverty. Poverty is a risk factor to girl's vulnerability to abuse and HIV/AIDS.

Maboshe Memorial Centre (MMC) does this through village savings where the members of the group contribute money and provide loans to each other. This has assisted poor adolescent girls and young women to start small scale business as their sustainable livelihood and enable them to be economically independent.

By and large, it has been acknowledged that women's economic empowerment is central to realising the 2030 SDGs especially SDG5, "Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls". Therefore, mechanisms to end gender discrimination and inequality will open up more opportunities to improving women's capacities to empower them economically and socially towards the transformation agenda.

Maboshe Memorial Centre (MMC) is committed to advancing women's economic empowerment as an essential part of the efforts to promote gender equality. This stems from a realization that secure, sustainable, and inclusive economic growth cannot happen without the full participation of women and girls in all socio-economic activities. These include education, employment, entrepreneurship and access to productive resources and services such as capital, credit, land, knowledge of financial literacy and management.

• Business management and group dynamic trainings in business entrepreneurial skills of livestock- goats, chicken, pigs, making soap, peanut butter, groundnut oil, etc
• Small micro-credit loans empowerment programmes
• Maboshe Memorial Centre (MMC) will, in this regard, advocate to make education accessibility a priority with the aim to redress women's marginalisation and vulnerability which is largely a structural tool of discrimination and exploitation.
• Maboshe Memorial Centre (MMC) will campaign on women's land rights and ownership as well as support livelihood interventions through innovative income generating initiatives by women with productive resources that they own such as land.
• Maboshe Memorial Centre (MMC) will support its community member to undertake other economic empowerment opportunities such as community savings model and access to finance/credit and extension services in order to unlock women's economic potential and participation from micro to macro levels.
• Maboshe Memorial Centre (MMC) will also advocate for policy makers to come up with a deliberate policy environment that will support cross learning and offer women and girls new avenues for economic empowerment.
• In pursuit of rights-based and people centred approach, Maboshe Memorial Centre (MMC) will focus on advocacy aimed at achieving equity and fairness in the distribution of public resources through social accountability mechanisms to demand for transparency around public finance management. In this regard
• Maboshe Memorial Centre (MMC) will work to entrench gender responsive budgeting as one of the key elements within the public finance management and accountability. This system of tracking budgetary allocations and disbursements will work to provide capacity and opportunities for gender advocates to engage in fiscal and national budget decision making.

LONG TERM OUTCOME:

• Increased income generated by women with productive resources they own in Maboshe Memorial Centre (MMC) operational areas
• Increased number of women in Maboshe Memorial Centre (MMC) operational areas that own and have control over land
• Increased number of women in Maboshe Memorial Centre (MMC) operational areas accessing finance/credit and extension services for productive purposes