Uganda Women Entrepreneurship Programme (UWEP) and economic empowerment of beneficiaries in Kabale district, 2016- 2022

Abstract

Given the need to ensure comprehensive women economic empowerment through entrepreneurship, The UWEP was launched in Uganda in financial year 2015/2016 and it started operating in Kabale district in financial year 2016/2017. However, for all of those years, it wasn’t clear on whether UWEP has had serious impact of the women in Kabale from the empirical point of view. This prompted the researcher to conduct a study that sought to examine the approaches used by UWEP to economically empower women; to find out the extent to which women are taking advantage of UWEP; to explore the impact of UWEP on women’s economic empowerment and to examine the challenges the programme has encountered in its efforts to achieve Women’s Economic Empowerment. Desktop research, secondary and some primary data were collected and analyzed thematically to derive meanings. The study was guided by the rights-based approach theoretical framework. The findings showed that UWEP used two approaches, the group approach that is complemented by the revolving fund approach. Furthermore, the findings revealed that to a lesser extent, women have taken advantage of the programme. The results highlighted that UWEP provided women groups with the revolving fund as startup capital in addition to skilling them. Evidence further revealed that UWEP contributed to cultivating a spirit of developing small and medium enterprises among the women of Kabale district, providing capital, increasing agricultural productivity, building high esteem levels among women, property and wealth accumulation among others. However, findings indicated a number of challenges. These included among others; narrow scope of programme interventions, tendency of some husbands to control the mobility of their wives, limited resource envelope, delays in disbursement of funds, discriminatory practices in programme implementation, ineffectiveness of the group approach and poor coordination of the programme implementation. This calls for a more comprehensive and holistic review of the structural and agency frameworks for more effective implementation of UWEP to realize the goal of economically empowering women into progressive entrepreneurs. The programmes’ approaches need to be revisited and revised, the WEF should be increased, programme awareness campaigns broadened, increase funds to support programme supervision and monitoring activities.