Challenges Undermining the Effectiveness of Women Enterprise Fund (WEF) on Women’s Socio-Economic Empowerment in Embu County

Abstract

Women face a multitude of challenges in accessing skills and productive, advancing to higher level jobs, as well as returning to the labor market after a period of absence spent, mainly in raising children. The dimensions and problems related to Women's Economic Empowerment (WEE) show that the main obstacles are lack of both manpower and financial capacity. This is an area for greater attention by development actors through increased competency, innovation as well as coming up with ways in which WEE can generally support thriving economies. Achieving WEE will take sound public policies, a holistic approach and long-term commitment from all development actors. Despite this revelation, past studies on nexus between effectiveness of WEF and socio-economic empowerment are scarce and vague and not contextualized to Embu County. Moreover, the studies lack clear conceptualization and operationalization of skills and mentoring constructs as well as lack of relationship models that include WEE antecedents and consequences. This paper is derived from an ongoing PhD study and seeks to explore the challenges undermining the effectiveness of Women Economic Fund (WEF) on social economic empowerment of women in Embu County. It is guided by Social Solidarity Circle Theory that was advanced by Yunus (2004) and complemented by Sarah Longwe’s Gender Analytical Framework and is anchored on the broad thematic area on education, mentoring, skilling and innovation for WEE. A descriptive research design as complemented by exploratory design was used. The target population consisted of WEF beneficiary groups in Embu County, Constituency WEF officers and key informants from two constituencies namely, Manyatta and Runyenjes. Embu County was selected as an area of study given the diversity of cultural and social practices as influenced by the different ethnic groups that occupy the area hence the need for WEF to stir development. This paper is anchored on the importance of mainstreaming women in broader enterprise support policies and mentoring programs that should flow in tandem with financing initiatives like WEF. This would translate to an effective socio-economic empowerment of women and thus the findings draw a pathway for the most effective models and strategies that define efforts to empower women and consequently improve the level of better family economy and self-reliance. This paper recommends that the WEF considers scaling up training of the recipients of its loans and designing capacity building programs to meet the standard needs for women entrepreneurs.