Women’s Leadership and Economic Empowerment in Africa

Training women in economic empowerment and leadership to advance gender equality, transform communities and reduce poverty

Towards a Solution

Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation (MASHAV) considers the empowerment of women a critical and central component of its development policy. To address the challenges noted above, MASHAV and the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office (ESARO) collaborated from 2013 to 2019 on training and sharing tools for women's leadership and economic empowerment.  The goal of this work was to drive accelerated, equitable and sustainable development in Africa, while taking into consideration increasing challenges and complexities, influenced by both local and global developments.

The main areas of cooperation included economic empowerment of women (paying attention to women in agribusiness and technology), capacity building and training in agro-business development and the design and running of leadership development programmes in the East and Horn of Africa regions and in Israel. In addition, MASHAV provided counselling for the establishment of the Africa Centre for Transformative and Inclusive Leadership (ACTIL), a joint venture between MASHAV and UN Women, in partnership with Kenyatta University.

UN Women mobilized groups of women from countries in the region to participate in the programme, provided greenhouse kits to the groups and covered the costs of agro-technology exchange visits to Israel. MASHAV provided technical assistance in the form of skills transfer and training in agro-business and assisted participants to gain direct exposure and learning from exchanges of good practices and approaches of partner countries, Israel and international organizations.

The ACTIL centre was established in 2014 in Nairobi, Kenya, and MASHAV was able to support ACTIL based on its model already implemented in Israel, the Golda Meir MASHAV-Carmel International Training Center (MCTC), which was one of the first training centres in the world dedicated to the advancement of women. Following ACTIL’s request, MASHAV designed a tailor-made study tour in Israel for forty ACTIL professionals to present programmes and good practices, including professional visits to Israeli women’s organizations involved in the advancement of women at all levels. The next step was to share experiences for planning and executing a pilot training programme for African women leaders, which took place in Nairobi.

During the period of the partnership, ACTIL designed and provided training in transformational leadership to women politicians, senior officials in public service and women in agri-business from Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Somalia, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Of note, seven courses on the economic and political empowerment of women were designed and carried out in Israel, with a total of 166 women and 13 men attending, and several leadership and entrepreneurship training sessions took place at ACTIL in Kenya.

ACTIL has become a vibrant and innovative training centre and its inspirational vision was noticeably shared by parties involved in this successful initiative. The leadership competencies of upcoming and existing leaders, especially women and youth, in politics, business, government and society were built, making the trainees “agents of change” and having a multi-level ripple effect, extending to families, communities and countries. MASHAV’s consultancy missions to Kenya to provide technical advice and support in setting up efficient systems of operation, structure and design for training programmes helped maximize ACTIL’s impact and ensured its sustainability.