50 MILLION AFRICAN WOMEN SPEAK NETWORKING PLATFORM
Project Partner: African Development Fund
This is a project aimed to create and deploy a social media platform, the 50 Million Women Speak platform that enables women to access business training, mentorship, financial services, and locally relevant business information while building their own networks of contacts. It will build on the ubiquity and popularity of mobile phones so that the burden of learning and accessing information and services is limited allowing women to manage their businesses and their social circumstances. In doing so, it will address the key development challenges: Women-owned SMEs face in accessing finance and the ability to grow their businesses Women-owned SMEs face in accessing information relevant to their business needs Women entrepreneurs face in creating important business networks.
The project seeks to cut across three regional economic communities with a population of about 977 million. This would impact cross-border policy-regulatory and institutional reforms in the financial sector to support the platform coupled with better coordination, harmonization, and synchronization mechanisms to create inclusiveness and set the appropriate environment for growth. Strategic oversight and governance of the project is via a Project Steering Committee (PSC) compromised of relevant bodies of which CCGD is one of the appointed members. CCGD will give support to the government in formulating a national policy for the project as well as contribute to the regional policy framework.
