Women and Youth Empowerment

CPI Kenya has been engaging women in the inter community peace activities among the pastoralist’s communities since 2011. However, the women empowerment program is specifically designed to support and engage women in business through social economic empowerment while at the same time promoting peace.  To be able to achieve this, CPI Kenya started Inter community women entrepreneurs’ network among Samburu and Pokot women in business. CPI Kenya supports women to strengthen ties between communities and show how women can build peace in fragile environments. As a result, we have seen women led enterprises get stronger and increased cohesion among the neighboring communities because of business interdependence. An important goal of the network isn’t just to create a successful group business, but to make sure that the women’s’ individual businesses are growing, too. So as their group businesses grow and make profit, the Samburu and Pokot groups separately divvy up the profits so that the women can also boost their individual businesses. While WEN empowers businesswomen to build sustainable livelihoods, it’s also an avenue for peace. And given their wide variety of roles, businesswomen in pastoralist communities play an important part in creating peace. Additionally, CPI Kenya works with young people in the same areas to catalyze sustainable collective action and improve livelihoods by providing young people with the resources and skills they need to design and implement a social enterprise project of their choosing. Young people organize themselves in groups and through the support of CPI Kenya engage in different business enterprises while at the same time contributing to peace in their various communities. By tapping the energy of young people,and building up on our efforts to engage young people as peace ambassadors, we believe young people have the potential to chart their own development.