7 Chitemwiko Close, Kabulonga, Lusaka, Zambia, 10101 // +260 977 790 075
“Across rural and peri-urban communities, CARE’s education and empowerment programs engage a vast cohort of girls and women in Zambia that are representative across diverse age groups. CARE’s interventions integrate values and approaches to foster leadership, entrepreneurship, skills development, private sector engagement, and financial inclusion.”
Education
CARE’s education programming seeks to improve enrollment, retention, and access to inclusive and age-appropriate education and training to meet the needs of children and adolescents with a focus on girls. CARE supports quality learning for Early Childhood Development and Early Childhood Education, and works with school management committees and community structures to ensure that schools provide safe and inclusive spaces for learning that prioritize reading, writing, and life skills.
As children grow, CARE works with communities to generate awareness and community support for the value of Goal: 769,602 women and girls have more equitable access to education, leadership, and empowerment opportunities learning and education. The main goal is to ensure that adolescents are supported to stay in school or pursue meaningful pathways back to school for healthier and safer lives. For out of school girls, CARE has been scaling its Accelerated Learning Program that it developed in coordination with the Ministry of Education and is providing vulnerable girls with technical and vocational training opportunities.
Empowerment
CARE has been a pioneer, providing training and support to women farmers, promoting women’s participation in collectives and community groups, increasing women’s access to and control over resources, and increasing women’s participation in markets, leadership and decision-making spaces.
Gender Equality:
CARE addresses barriers, inequalities, and risks to gender equality through its CARE’s Gender Equality Framework by strengthening women and girl’s agency, engaging men and boys as allies, working to change power relations that prevent women and girls from realizing their rights and participating equitably, and engaging with duty bearers and to systemically address gender inequality.
Eliminating GBV:
Preventing and responding to gender-based violence is a crucial part of CARE’s commitment to promoting gender equality and ending poverty. CARE responds to sexual violence by supporting women to recover physically, psychologically, and economically. We provide health, counselling, and livelihoods support to enable women to rebuild their lives. To eliminate GBV, CARE works with communities to directly address – and change – the attitudes that make gender-based violence possible.
Women Economic Empowerment:
CARE applies market-based approaches to support sustainable solutions for women and girls to have equitable access to and control over economic resources. This includes promoting VSLAs as vehicles for women’s economic empowerment; supporting growth-oriented female entrepreneurs and female-run businesses to thrive and create employment; building partnerships with the private sector to generate and scale market-based solutions to tackle development challenges; leveraging the power of cash and voucher assistance to deliver relief to people facing acute and prolonged crisis; and advocating for decent and dignified employment opportunities and working conditions for women and youth.
CARE’s financial inclusion work is anchored in its Youth/Village Savings and Loans Association (Y/VSLA) methodology, which was first developed by CARE in 1991 in Niger, and since 1998, CARE has been applying this approach in Zambia to facilitate informal group members’ savings. The Y/VSLA model offers a range of basic financial services aimed at fostering a culture of saving, raising household incomes, increasing the voice and role of women in financial and household decision-making, building financial literacy and entrepreneurship skills, ultimately improving overall health, education and protection outcomes. Access to and control over resources allows youth and women to invest in businesses, and evidence from CARE’s work shows that women who participate in VSLA are twice as likely to start and sustain a business compared to women who do not participate.
Women Leaders:
CARE is fostering a network of female, Zambian leaders from across diverse sectors and geographies to serve as a support network for each other and mentor adolescent females. CARE will invest in women leaders to have the knowledge, skills, and confidence to identify, pursue, and achieve their economic aspirations and interests.