Women economic and social empowerment for enhanced access to job market opportunities in Sao Tomé and Principe (COVID-19 MPTF)

As mentioned, in order to contribute to the efforts to meet the Sustainable Development Goals and support private-led inclusive growth through the III ENIEG strategy, the government promotes gender equality as well as women’s economic empowerment and financial inclusion as one of its priorities. The importance attached to it is also reflected by the fact that National Conference that launch the ENIEG III was jointly supported by both the UN and the IMF. Indeed, women’s economic empowerment is an important element of the new three-year Extended Credit Facility (ECF) program between the IMF and the Government. This proposal, if approved, could greatly contribute for a successful implementation of this program thus opening-up possibilities for further funding from the IMF and other donors providing budget-support, like the EU and the AFDB for example. The project will specifically support female workers in the informal economy who lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic, as well as small businesses that have experienced a decline in their performance indicators such as volume of the production, level of sales, turnover. It was found as a result of assessments that young people and women were negatively affected by the effects of the pandemic. In close collaboration with the Ministry of Youth, the project's interventions involving training and access to financing will enable small and medium-sized enterprises particularly in the digital and green economy to be identified and selected on a rigorous basis, to enable them not only to maintain their volume of activities in a context of crises, but also to be able to scale up their economic entities through additional financing, more ambitious business plans and broadening the level of geographical coverage of their enterprises. The back to school activities will be implemented in collaboration and in synergy with existing intervention and programs led by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Labour Family and Solidarity with technical support from UNICEF and funded by strategic partners e.g. COVID-19 acceleration fund for back to school funded by Global Partnership for Education; support to access to social protection for vulnerable families funded with Joint SDG Fund; the program on parental education, funded by the Joint SDG and World Bank, Girls Empowerment and Education Program from the World Bank. Through the development of a databased and established selection criteria to select the most vulnerable families, the Ministry of Education will also be able to capitalize on the work of collecting vulnerable family data and their triangulation, for other interventions in the long term and strengthen the capacity to respond to external shocks while improving transparency and data reliability. The UN enjoys a position in São Tomé and Principe that uniquely enables it to gain consensus across the political spectrum and to convene actors from public and private sectors to harness an effective public-private partnership (PPP). Through its partnerships and reputation, inside and outside the country, the UN can leverage the participation of institutions and investors that may otherwise lack confidence to engage in a solely government-led initiative (such as, the Diaspora and commercial investors). The UN’s role in promoting the SDGs and assisting governments to explore new mechanisms to achieve those goals has global awareness and imparts a heightened sense of purpose with the UN’s involvement, while also demonstrating its value-add. Support from this MPTF call is a new source of funding that would also encourage partners around the initiative, especially the EU, World Bank, Portugal and AfDB. As an innovative catalytic investment targeting women, donors are not forced to redirect limited resources from existing commitments and can assess the preliminary outcomes to inform their support to scale-up the initiative. Further, while alternative funding may be sought through UN

Project symbol

STP/20/51/UND

Admin unit

DWT/CO-Yaounde

Start date

02/11/2020

End date

31/03/2022

Total allocation

85000

Total expenditure

Status

Closed

80627

Development Partners

Multi Partner Trust Fund Office, UNDP

Country/Countries

Sao Tome and Principe

Outcomes

Outcome 3: Economic, social and environmental transitions for full, productive and freely chosen employment and decent work for all