About

Women’s Economic Empowerment

Launched in 2009, the Women’s Economic Empowerment project is funded by the MDG3 Global Fund by the Government of the Netherlands. Through the project, WIEGO and its partners are advocating for the needs of informal workers, especially women. The projects seeks to promote the voice, visibility and validity of working poor women across different countries, sectors and issues in the informal economy. As part of this project, WIEGO’s Global Trade Programme, in partnership with leading Fair Trade organizations in seven countries, initiated Fair Trade for Women Producers with a focus on documenting, analyzing and disseminating key success factors of fair trade by involving women producers in all stages of development.

PROJECT OUTPUTS

Case Studies
Through the Case Studies, Fair Trade for Women Producers aims at demonstrating how informal workers have organized collective forms of enterprise to engage with local and global markets. These case studies are being collected through a process of action research, which enables informal workers to tell their story in their own words. The objective is to use the case studies to share the learning with other informal workers as an incentive to organize themselves. Each case study will be couched in an analysis of the context of trade liberalization in that country/region or sector. Through this process WIEGO will open up a space for analyzing the impact of trade liberalization on informal wage workers and informal producers, and its impact on gender equity, with the hopes of improving sustainability of the Fair Trade Movement.

Photo Journals
Given the low literacy level of many of the women producers, it was important to complement the narrative of the women’s stories with visual images which also convey the women’s lives.  Many of the local facilitators have been issued with digital cameras so that they can capture the reality of the women as they go about their work and their participation in their organizations as well as in the project activities such as workshops. It is hoped to find partner organizations in each country who may be willing to sponsor or facilitate an exhibition of the photos if the quality is at the right level.

Documentaries
Some of the countries are commissioning professional documentaries while others are developing songs, murals and basketry which tells the women’s stories.

About WIEGO:
Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) is a global action-research-policy network that seeks to improve the status of the working poor, especially women, in the informal economy by increasing their representative Voice through more and stronger organizations and their official Visibility through better statistics and research. The individuals and institutions in the WIEGO network are drawn from three broad constituencies: membership-based organizations (MBOs) of informal workers; research, statistical, and academic institutions; and development agencies of various types (non-governmental, governmental, and inter-governmental). For more information see http://www.wiego.org