Thematic Areas
Thematic Areas
Every programme we run sits inside one of our thematic areas: economic empowerment, equitable access to knowledge, and climate justice applied as a lens across our work.
Three areas shape everything we do, from the first savings account to the last mile of a water-scarce day. Here is what each one means, and the work already underway.
Economic Empowerment and Financial Freedom
When a woman earns and controls her own money, she gains the standing to make her own decisions. In rural Kenya, that is withheld: land is registered in men’s names, household cash moves through men’s hands, and a woman’s labour rarely becomes a woman’s income. Our work in this area exists to close the poverty gap and put earning power, practical financial skills, and a genuine footing to save and borrow directly into women’s hands.
A savings account built for small deposits
We partnered with a SACCO for low-income savers, so a member with no formal account can save around small, regular deposits, from as little as KES 20, rather than large lump sums.
School fees, kept safe
Insured accounts give women a way to set aside money for non-negotiable costs like their children’s school fees, protected rather than kept somewhere it can be lost or spent.
Understand what you sign up for
Sessions run with the SACCO so women don’t only save, but understand how the products work, what credit actually costs, and how to grow what they set aside.
Loans on terms that fit
Through the same partnership, women reach loans on fair terms, with repayment periods and conditions built for a rural household’s real cash flow.
Run the money already coming in
Classes on self-employment and small business: setting prices, keeping records, separating business cash from household cash, and planning for the lean seasons every rural household knows.
Business fundamentals, in their hands
On International Women’s Day 2025, Equity Bank sponsored a series of entrepreneurship classes for our members, practical training for women building something of their own.
Beyond individual classes, accounts, and loans, we are building the links, to markets, to income opportunities, and to one another, so that support outlasts any single session and no woman is left to face a setback alone.
On the ground
Donors
Support this workOrganisations, SACCOs & training providers
Partner with usEquitable Access to Knowledge
Knowledge works on two levels. External knowledge is what a woman can be given access to: education, training, information, mentorship, and the exposure that widens what she can imagine for herself. Internal knowledge is what she already holds: her own value, talent, and capability. Many women are raised to understand themselves only through others, and rarely as people with worth of their own. Our work here does both at once, it opens the external doors that were closed, and it helps women recognise the capability that was always theirs.
A genuine second chance at reading and writing
Gumbaru (also Ngumbaru) is the East African term for adult education. For women married as children and denied schooling, our classes rebuild the foundation: a woman who can read can sign her own name, read the terms of a loan, follow her child’s schoolwork, and reach every other opportunity on this page.
From learning to read to earning a living
We partner with Matuu Vocational College, a government-certified institution. Once a woman has basic reading and writing, this opens the door to technical training and a marketable skill.
Digital literacy that changed what’s reachable
In collaboration with Microsoft, we ran intensive training: how to use a computer, how computers work, how to research, and an introduction to AI. Women who completed it now use local cyber cafés to research, read ebooks, apply for jobs, and access government services online.
Books that travel between villages
We collect donated books through community book drives and turn them into a mobile library. Young people across the area borrow books to learn from and to enjoy, keeping reading alive where books are scarce.
Each of these opens an external door. And each time a woman walks through one, she gathers proof of her own capability. That recognition is the internal knowledge we set out to reach.
On the ground
Donors
Support this workColleges, tech & education partners
Partner with usClimate Justice as a Lens
Climate injustice falls hardest on women and rural communities. We treat it as a lens: a way of seeing the pressures on the women we work with, and building around them.
On the Yatta Plateau, that pressure has a name: water. Women and girls carry the heaviest share of water poverty, the hours lost to fetching it, the schooling and income that labour costs, and the deeper poverty that follows when the rains fail.
- Flexible, self-paced learning, timed around water collection and seasonal labour, so a woman isn’t shut out of education by the demands already on her day.
- Skills and enterprise paths that hold up when a season doesn’t.
- Engaging county and public-sector partners on the pressures our members can’t solve alone.
