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Women's Empowerment and Poverty Alleviation

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Implementing Partners: Ministry of Local Administration and Environment; Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor; Daraa, Latakia, Aleppo and Al Raqqa Governorates
Practice Area: Poverty Reduction
Total Budget: US$ 3, 164, 828 (USD (Government/MoSAL ($689,430), UNDP TRAC ($250,000) )
Total expenditures to date (Dec 2009): US $920, 139.00
Duration: 2007-2010 (extended)
Status: Ongoing
Location: Daraa, Latakia, Aleppo, Dair Ezzor, Hassakeh and Al Raqqa Governorates

Description / Overview:

The project “Women’s Empowerment and Poverty Alleviation” aims at setting the framework for the technical assistance that UNDP will provide to the National Programme on Poverty Alleviation and Women Empowerment that was stipulated in the National Tenth Five-Year Plan (FYP).

Cross Cutting Themes:

This project mainly aims at women’s empowerment and conceives it as a tool to alleviate poverty. It furthermore promotes human rights by raising awareness of gender, child-related, reproductive health issues, along with the elimination of illiteracy.


Objectives:

Adopting an approach that uses women empowerment as an entry point for poverty alleviation with a special focus on financial empowerment through microfinance, project main outputs are:
  1. Identification of the poor areas that will be targeted by the programme, defining the microfinance mechanism and testing the mechanism in five pilot villages then launching the programme on a bigger scale covering the poorest areas in the country.
  2. Establishing a sustainable microfinance mechanism and prepare an exit strategy that insure a smooth transfer for the projct once the roll of UNPD ends and strengthening the national ownership of the project.

Target Beneficiaries:
Poor women in the targeted areas


Implementation Strategy:

  • In cooperation with the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor the project will address in an integrated manner the dimensions of poverty: opportunity, empowerment and security (human capital and economic approaches).
  • Provide poor women with access to financial services (microfinance) in order to increase household's economic security and income, to reduce their vulnerability to risks and to help them building assets;
  • Developing new economic and job opportunities for poor women entrepreneurs by helping them to create their own businesses,
  • Raising awareness among the local communities and women, especially those already active in the local economy, about reproductive health, local governance and gender issues 

Achievements / Current Status:

As of February 2010:
  •  Microfinance module drafted to best suit the project.
  • Targeted areas for the project’s new phase identified in cooperation with the SPC to reach a total of 25 areas in 2008 and 2009.
  • The project was successful during the past 2 years in targeting 25 areas rural and urban of the poorest areas in the country, trained 1513 women on its comprehensive training package (social and business development) and disbursed 83 loans with 260 accepted applications that are waiting to get financed. 

Partnerships:
N/A

Project Documents Link: 
Team Leader: Rima Al Hassani PO: Mohamed Battah
National Project Director (NPD): Wissam Al Ahmad.
UNDP Project Management: Social Development and Poverty Reduction Team
E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it  
Last update of project information: February 2010