Posted on February 26, 2008

Gates Foundation Awards $19 Million to Foster Women's Empowerment in West Africa

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced a four-year, $19 million grant to a poverty reduction and women's empowerment project supported by the United Nations Development Program that's designed to boost the productivity and income of women farmers using low-cost mechanized power.

The grant will help establish six hundred new sustainable rural agro-enterprises in the West African countries of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Senegal. The centerpiece of the project is the multifunctional platform (MFP), a diesel-run engine mounted on a chassis to which processing equipment can be attached, mechanizing domestic tasks normally done with a mortar and pestle or a grinding stone and turning them into profitable economic activities. Without a connection to the electricity grid, women in rural Africa can spend up to six hours a day on meal preparation, while their daughters often perform poorly in school or drop out entirely because they have to help their mothers, perpetuating the cycle of illiteracy, ill health, and poverty from one generation to the next.

To address the problem, UNDP and local NGOs will provide groups of rural women who participate in the project with literacy and management training. "This project will employ cost-effective technology to significantly improve the lives of women in West Africa by freeing up time — their scarcest resource — and enabling them to sell higher value products at market more often, thus increasing their income and improving lives," said Dr. Rajiv Shah, director of agricultural development in the Gates Foundation's Global Development Program. "Through this effort, we hope to learn whether these platforms could reach an even larger number of communities in Africa."