Irish Aid

PG2 built on the successes, experiences and cross-learning from PGI. We have focused in delivering on three core objectives:

1. Increased economic empowerment for women and youth.  We worked with partners, women and youth to increase employment opportunities, access to productive markets and business capital, farming and business skills and personal agency and leadership ability. More broadly, the programme aims to encourage the adoption of pro-poor policy and budget allocation at local and national levels.
2. Greater gender equality.  We worked with partners to decrease gender-based violence (GBV) in communities by providing capacity building to GBV service providers, raising local awareness towards behavioural and attitudinal change while also increasing women's leadership and participation across all levels and improving the policy and legislative framework pertaining to gender equality.
3. Increased access to essential health services through holding duty bearers to account.  We worked through partners with poor and marginalised people to improve local health facilities by providing capacity building to duty bearers; government officials, district health care officers and healthcare personnel, lobbying on supply chain and responsiveness of local providers and advocating for universal health care and increased budgetary support for health. Malawi is the only country to work on this objective.

Through our PGII programme in Tanzania, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Uganda and Malawi we have engaged 39 implementing partners and reached an average of 75,000 people annually from 2017-2022, with economic empowerment activities for women and youth to increase levels of income, ownership of productive assets and access to employment, capital, training, markets, and technologies. We also contributed to greater gender equality, for example, by reaching 7M people with a campaign about gender-based violence (GBV) in 2022, to help increase awareness and understanding of the causes and consequence of GBV.  In Malawi we worked to increase access to universal healthcare, and in all PGII countries, our influencing work sought to ensure that national legislative frameworks were in place and implemented to support pro-poor development.

The Irish Aid (IA)/Oxfam Ireland (OIE) funded development programme operated in 5 countries in East, Central and Southern Africa: Tanzania, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and South Africa. The purpose of the programme is to improve quality of life and wellbeing of targeted communities due to better and more secure livelihoods, greater gender equality, access to appropriate services and a reduction in the burden of HIV/AIDS. The programme has 3 outcomes streams: women and men realize their right to secure and sustainable livelihoods; women and girls gain power over their lives and live free from violence; and the incidence and impact of HIV/AIDS is reduced.

We worked across micro, meso and macro levels to promote the empowerment of women and girls in a manner that addressed immediate and pressing needs while also challenging deep-rooted, generational gender inequality. We recorded significant success across all three levels including:

• Changing legislation – in Tanzania, we facilitated 3,000 women to engage with the 2013/14 constitutional review process in. 11 out of the 12 issues advocated by the women were included in the draft constitution. This provided a basis for review of existing laws and the creation of new laws that benefit women and end discrimination.
• Access to Resources - in Rwanda we worked with micro-finance institutions (MFI) to make €253,250 available to small holder farmers to enable them to engage in new enterprises.
• Changing beliefs and behaviours - in Zimbabwe the percentage of women seeking legal and paralegal support after experiencing GBV and other harmful social practice increase by 7% during the first two years of the programme from 24% to 31%.