By Tereza Jeremiah Chuei
Investing in Women in South Sudan (IIW-SS) project has launched in Juba for the competition of private sector business window yesterday, and it’s being implemented in Central Equatoria State Juba and Eastern Equatoria State Torit towns respectively.
The programme aims to economically empower women in the agricultural sector through selected value chains.
The project also seek to enhance women’s economic empowerment through production and sale of honey, sorghum, sesame, Shea nut and groundnut and value chains in South Sudan to increase incomes, and reduce climate risks to transform livelihoods.
Investing in Women in South Sudan (IIW-SS) is a gender equality and economic inclusion programme implemented by the AECF with funding from global Affairs Canada (GAC).
While, its objective is to reduce gender-specific barriers to women’s participation in agriculture value chains to increased adoption in agricultural practices.
Meanwhile, the head of Agribusiness-AECF Sebastian Wanjala, said that beneficiaries are going to be women in agricultural value chains of focus, adding that IIW-SS aim to directly benefit 6,000 smallholder farmers’ households (36,000 persons), with 80 percent being women.
“the AECF is the world’s largest challenge fund and we have perfected this model to identify unique and innovative business ideas that have impacted, we will use this challenge fund model to select investees that offer innovative solutions in the target value chains, the model is going to selects investees through a competition process that provides fair and equal access to available funding,” he said.