Women’s Economic Empowerment Rural Development Project

Women's Economic Empowerment Rural Development Project (WEE-RDP) comprises of four components. The first component, community mobilization and institution development aim to build sustainable community institutions through social and economic mobilization of rural women. The second component, access to finance will facilitate empowering of both community institutions that is, savings group (SGs) and village savings and loans associations (VSLAs) and its members to develop as sustainable financial institutions at the community level and eventually establish direct linkages with financial service providers including microfinance institutions (MFIs) and commercial banks. The third component, enterprise development and market linkages aim to finance common assets of public goods nature based on business needs and assessment of market failures using the maximizing finance for development (MFD) cascade principle. The fourth component, project management will finance salaries of project staff, consultancies, training programs, office equipment, and incremental operational costs of set up under MRRD and provincial units.

This project is co-finannced with $25 million IDA grant.

EXPECTED RESULTS:

The project will engage in 76 districts and 5,000 villages in all 34 provinces across Afghanistan and will work in close collaboration with several other rural development programs in the country, including the Citizens’ Charter, Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD) projects, National Horticulture and Livestock Project, Access to Finance Project, and microfinance institutions.