Skip to main content
Skip to main content

Women’s Innovation for Sustainable Enterprises (WISE) Project.

The WISE project is a four-year project implemented by Plan International Ghana, URBANET and WIDO as well as private sector stakeholders. The project seeks to enhance economic empowerment, well-being and inclusive economic growth for women in Ghana.

The WISE Project will focus on setting up and expanding both micro and small-enterprises led by women; it will aim to attract private sector partners to support climate-smart agriculture and green business opportunities, while reducing environmental impacts and addressing climate stresses. At the core, this integrated package of interventions – from foundational life skills and financial education to technical and entrepreneurship support while addressing gender inequalities at the household, community and institutional levels – will create a gender-responsive ecosystem for the meaningful economic engagement of Ghanaian women to improve not only their condition but also their position as economic actors.

Taking a highly participatory and local approach, the project will ‘crowd-in’ existing service providers and stakeholders through an inclusive, innovative and gender-transformative hub model. The project strategically opted to support women-owned businesses to leverage the presence of an existing large number of women entrepreneurs in Ghana.

In parallel to developing a suite of women-friendly business services, the Project will tackle the local root causes of gender inequalities to empower women entrepreneurs by engaging men. This entails identifying, sensitizing and training male champions to promote gender equality among male family members of the target women entrepreneurs. Male champions will promote positive masculinities, social aversion among men to practices of SGBV and CEFM, sharing of responsibilities at the household level, and engagement of women in family and community-level decision making.

Project Goal: Increased realization of rights to economic empowerment, well-being and inclusive economic growth for women in five districts within Northern, Bono, Bono East and Ahafo regions in Ghana

Two intermediate outcomes will contribute to achieving the ultimate goal:

  • Improved women’s agency to exercise decisions regarding their participation in economic growth
  • Increased productivity, profitability and innovation of women-owned businesses

Target: In total, 12,641 women (aged 19 – 55) will directly benefit, with 4,046 of those women receiving targeted support for agricultural and green businesses.

Duration of Project: January 2020 – June 2024.

Donor: Global Affairs Canada (GAC)