Background
Gender inequality persists in Thailand, impacting women and girls’ economic potential due to limited access to finance and relevant business, digital, and financial skills. Discrimination and domestic responsibilities further constrain opportunities for women’s economic empowerment. Rural women, especially along the Mekong River, face additional challenges, including lower incomes, entrenched gender norms, limited access to government services, and the impacts of climate change on local ecosystems.
Empowering these women can have a profound impact on gender equality, break inter-generational cycles of poverty, and boost national GDP. Kenan addresses these challenges by fostering empowered, equitable, and resilient communities where all women and girls can thrive. In particular, our WE Inspire program, developed in partnership with the Mekong – U.S. Partnership, aims to empower women in the Lower Mekong Sub-Region (LMS) across Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Since 2021, the program has provided over 200 women in Northern Thailand with training on financial literacy, digital literacy, and business skills, and helped more than 50 marginalized women in Thailand access healthcare services.
The Project
WE Inspire, an integrated development model, convenes partners to economically empower women in need by providing entrepreneurial and employability skills, financial literacy, access to financing, health literacy, and affordable health insurance options for low-income women, enabling them to embark on a journey towards a healthy life and financial well-being. In partnership with AVPN, Kenan will build networks of local partners and equip them with relevant skills and capacity to promote gender equality and social inclusion (GESI). The goal is to expand the model to reach more women, while also facilitating effective monitoring and building an evidence-based investment case to channel greater resources to rural populations.
Activities
Kenan will refine and scale up our WE Inspire model by working with 10 local partners to establish WE Inspire hubs in the North and the Northeast of Thailand. These hubs will empower 500 rural women and their supporters within three years. Simultaneously, Kenan will collaborate with a Gender Equality and Social Inclusion specialist to enhance its own GESI mainstreaming efforts, while sharing best practices with the local partners. In addition, an online Rural Women Entrepreneurship Dashboard will be developed with standardized indicators to enable government and private actors to monitor progress and direct their resources to support rural women in communities in need.
Results
The project is expected to help rural women gain increased knowledge, skills, as well as access to services, resources, and networks to achieve sustainable livelihoods. This will also contribute towards a more vibrant rural economy that benefits from increased participation of women. At the same time, Kenan and its local partners will have enhanced capacities to promote GESI among diverse demographic segments across Thailand.
