SPEAKERS' CORNER: How is your project supporting the empowerment of vulnerable groups?

Major vulnerable groups we are working with in Zimbabwe are farmers, vendors and traders. For all these groups, access to useful information (not gossip) is the difference between subistence and commercial activities.  My organisation is keeping these groups, particularly the enterprising ones who seek out ideas, always up to date with information relating to their businesses.  Basic information such as the cost benefit analysis of participating in a certain market is often very important but missing among these groups.  Another empowering activity we are doing is profiling these groups at individual and group levels towards giving them some kind of identity including  financial identity.  Most banks and other financial institutions, which have traditionally shunned these groups on the pretext that they are not organised, have started revisiting their perceptions and are now extending financial services to these groups, thanks to our intermediary and knowledge brokering roles.

I could go on.................

Charles Dhewa

www.knowledgetransafrica.com / www.emkambo.co.zw

In the Nairobi , Oxfam is partnering with 3 local organizations to support up to 20,000 women small scale traders and 10,000 women domestic workers living in 5 informal settlements. We focus on empowering the women through developing their capacities for better business and vocational skills, and through training them on their rights and responsibilities alongside developing their collective voices to enable them advocate for their rights.Our strategy is to work alongside business service providers, vocational training instutitions (both state and non state) in developing appropriate curriculums that are responsive to market needs, and ensure they are affordable and readily available to the target groups. This would ensure that the groups access training long after the project is completed, thus fostering sustainability. We are also creating linkages of the target groups with key service providers (financial services institutions, and national  social security facilities) and influencing the institutions to develop pro-poor packages that are affordable to the target groups.

We are targeting 5.000 vulnerable Maasai Women in Northern Tanzania.

Our activities mainly aim to:

1. developed skills to improve employability and income-generation activities among rural women through trainings in “Consumer and Marketplace Literacy”, technical trainings on process and market livestock related products (meat drying and salting, honey production and handicraft production), training on English

2. increase access to socio-economic services, through Members-based Organizations, empowerment and creation of Village Community Banks and Social funds access

3. Training on leadership, human rights, land rights and labour legislation to Traditional Women Groups’ representatives.

In India we are working with 10 different communites from the informal economy, starting from rag pickers to construction workers to domestic workers, bidi workers, agricultural labourers, fisher folks, street vendors, home based women workers, garment workers. This groups were not organised nor were they completely socially secured. ActionAid has been working with workers in the informal sector [PIE hencefourth] for over two decades in both rural and urban areas. The genesis of ActionAid’s work with PIE was not from the limited perspective of their work-related rights alone, but rather from a broader perspective of their rights as citizens. Hence the focus of our work has been not only on the right to minimum wages, better living and working conditions, medical insurance to cover the occupational health hazards, but also on socio-economic rights of housing, insurance, pension, healthcare, maternity entitlements and education for children. In order to pay attention to PIEs in a more formalized manner, ActionAid initiated a project called, “Working Peoples’ Charter”. The aim of undertaking this project has been to bring together organisations working with informal sector worker under one banner and to address the current challenges faced by the informal sector workers, which have been largely ignored by the central trade unions. With people from different forces coming together on the issue organically, the idea is slowly growing in a much larger process than just being limited to a project. It is important to mention here that in the current times, there is very little documentation on the issues of PIEs and the charter process also aims at generating new researches and documents on the issue. The Charter process has succeeded in creating conditions for more formalized network. Taking this process forward, ActionAid is in the process of building labour solidarity forum- to create an unique group of academia, researchers, lawyers, trade unions, media personnels, groups and individuals practicing workers rights, to strengthen wider solidarity. The forum shall support in advancing and contributing to the struggle of informal sector workers through knowledge creation, legal activism, publishing stories and actively participating in ongoing struggle. The charter process has been successful in contributing and building the campaign focussing on the thematic area, “Domestic workers and Universal Social Security for workers in the informal Sector”, which was chosen by the wider group. The efforts of the charter group has rejuvenated the existing struggles and has initiated a national campaign- Right to Social Security Campaign, which demands minimum universal social security and a national policy for the domestic workers.

Also the skilling part of the project helps us up-skilling of skilled people and skilling of unskilled people and link them to either employment or self employment, It also helps us to link the social security component to the workers and we see as one entity. Skilled people are also linked to mobile app called "mazdoor adda" through which they can provide home service and eradicate the middle man.