Programs

OUR MANDATE

The mandate of WAIH is identify systemic constraints of social and economic development, through conducting studies, and recommend solutions in order to ensure sustainability and structural transformation. To support the establishment of strong linkages among women and agri-entrepreneurs, related institutions and projects in order to ensure the effectiveness of agri-business, women empowerment and development activities.

Our Multi-dimensional Approach

We know that women, girls and other marginalized communities in Cameroon struggle and aspire in more than one area of their lives.

01

EDUCATION & LITERACY

Education is at the heart of what we do. WAIH facilitate a gender-sensitive education programs where girls, boys and their family can enjoy basic education comfortably. This includes constructing and renovating schools in appropriate locations and installing safely-built toilets. To maximize the impact, we provide complementary advocacy activities, such as hand-wash campaign, school gardening and nutrition lessons. In addition to girls, our reach extends to adult women with the aim to reduce the illiteracy rate among adult women in the areas of financial literacy, political literacy, human rights political participation and legal literacy through various types of training and workshop.

02

CLIMATE CHANGE AND AGRICULTURE.

We build, boost and transform women’s and their families’ resilience to climate change for empowering livelihoods. In an ever extreme climate, women farmers and their families face a high degree of food insecurity and income fluctuation due to their engagement in such a weather-dependent agricultural practice. Family members on average with no means of mitigating or adapting to risk and shocks, the climate change impacts on the livelihoods of women farmers in rural Cameroon are deepening.

While such a context may situate women as victims, we rather see them as ‘game changer’ to build resilient livelihoods through increased agricultural productivity, food security and household income. In so doing, WAIH support women farmers by providing a holistic package, namely climate resilient agricultural input package, hands-on training on conservation agricultural techniques, access to finance and access to market.

03

HEALTH

Health is one of the major thematic areas in which WAIH’s engages and resources mobilized. WAIH is mainly engaged in providing women and adolescent girls and young women the right knowledge, skills and resources to fully influence health policies that affects them. Areas of interventions are;

Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights
Psycho-social support
HIV/AIDS prevention, care and support for people living with HIV/AIDS
System strengthening and supporting the health services provision and facilities.
Social mobilization, and ensuring behavioral change, improving the health seeking behavior of the community.

04

HUMAN RIGHT AND PARTICIPATION:

We advocate for the human rights of women, girls and other marginalized communities. We believe that one of the critical conditions to empowerment – gaining control over making your own decisions – is to be able to ‘voice’. We recognize that many Cameroonian women and girls are lacking means to voice, hence their voices are being silenced. We see this as a form of structural violence against women.

Our work fills this gap – we are committed to end all forms of violence and discrimination against women, girls and other marginalized communities, namely Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), child marriage, forced marriage, rape, sexual assault, domestic violence and human trafficking.

As advocates of human rights and peace building, we facilitate legal aid services to get the silenced voice heard. In so doing, we provide legal logistical support and legal representation for those with limited means while organizing awareness raising campaigns and workshops around human rights, women’s and girls’ rights, human dignity and gender equality.
We also provide legal literacy training so as to increase the voicing capacity of those who have been excluded from legal participation.

05

WOMEN ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT, AND SKILL DEVELOPMENT.

WAIH projects promote community-driven resilience by empowering women at all levels. In alleviating poverty among marginalized women and their families, our work focuses on breaking the cycle of inter-generational poverty through resilient livelihoods by improving income security, diversifying income sources, and strengthening income generation abilities.

Securing a stable and diverse source of income will not just pave the way for women in rural Cameroon to rise from long-lasting poverty. It enables them to improve their family living conditions by purchasing school uniforms and textbooks to enroll children in schools and providing better health care. It enables them to gain control over household decision-making. Fighting and mitigating inter-generational poverty is thus a crucial step towards equality and social-economic justice.

To maximize such empowering impacts around income generation, we facilitate skills development opportunities for women and girls – with climate change effects in mind.

We train women farmers in conservation agricultural techniques and help them establish market linkages with local and international buyers. We have reached out to women and girls with disabilities – one of the most marginalized and forgotten groups of people – to develop skills in eco-friendly textile and handcraft production. Further, we train women in income-generating activities, including livestock and horticulture.

06

Enabling Policy Reform

WAIH works with credible local institutions to strengthen the evidence base and drive collective action needed to influence and inform policy reform that supports women’s equal economic participation, particularly related to the care economy.

07

OTHER SERVICES.

WAIH offers other services under the following three pillars.

Business Development Services.

WAIH provides investment and business advisory to women entrepreneurs, directly or indirectly improving the social and economic indicators of their business, families and communities. In view of the above, we use a rigorous selection process for choosing the entrepreneurs we support to make them ready for growth and investment. WAIH facilitate Business to Business (B2B) Agri-business and Food Technology Partnerships. Through the work of our team, we:

Establish partnerships geared towards agri-enterprise modernization and competitive needs.
Assist women-led SME’s, Agri-business with identifying possibilities of adaptation of their technologies to meet the needs of the local, agricultural sector.

Investment Services.

WAIH provides direct investment to women groups and implements programs that provide direct finance to small scale businesses as well. These include programs like ICT training for women, agriculture investment facility, Enterprises Finance Accelerator, and other programs implemented with partners. Provide financial and agri-business market advice on how to position agri-products, run an ethical and sustainable agri-business and agri-service positively impacting women. Through the work of our investment and advisory team, We:

Link promising agri-business farmer with the finance community, social responsible investors that commit to our principles of investing for impact.
Serve as a bridge between the public investment and private investment by sourcing, vetting, carrying out risk assessments through our network.
Work with local banks and micro finance with a gender lens and interest in growing women agri-business portfolio and women SME customer base.