Women's Economic Empowerment Rural Development Project

The development objective of the Women's Economic Empowerment Rural Development Project for Afghanistan is to increase social and economic empowerment of poor rural women in selected communities. The project comprises of four components. The first component, community mobilization and institution development aim to build sustainable community institutions through social and economic mobilization of rural women. The second component, access to finance will facilitate empowering of both community institutions that is, savings group (SGs) and village savings and loans associations (VSLAs) and its members to develop as sustainable financial institutions at the community level and eventually establish direct linkages with financial service providers including microfinance institutions (MFIs) and commercial banks. The third component, enterprise development and market linkages aim to finance common assets of public goods nature based on business needs and assessment of market failures using the maximizing finance for development (MFD) cascade principle. The fourth component, project management will finance salaries of project staff, consultancies, training programs, office equipment, and incremental operational costs of set up under Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD) and provincial units. The component will also support project coordination, implementation, monitoring and evaluation (M and E) at the national and provincial levels, as well as the running of the grievance redress mechanism.