CFP - Women’s Economic Empowerment – Increasing Entrepreneurship Skills for Out of School Adolescent Girls in Sustainable Energy UN Joint Programme for Empowering Adolescent Girls (2017-2020)

UN Women (UNW), grounded in the vision of equality enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, works for the elimination of discrimination against women and girls; the empowerment of women; and the achievement of equality between women and men as partners and beneficiaries of development, human rights, humanitarian action and peace and security. Placing women’s rights at the center of all its efforts, UN Women leads and coordinates United Nations system efforts to ensure that commitments on gender equality are translated into action throughout the world. It provides strong and coherent leadership in support of Member States’ priorities and efforts while building effective partnerships with civil society and other relevant actors.

Under its mandate to support Member States to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) gender-related targets in general and in particular SDG 5 with a focus on addressing gender-based inequalities to increase economic opportunities and access to productive resources for women of all ages; UN Women Tanzania is pleased to announce a Call for Proposals for Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) with innovative and high impact programmes on the advancement of gender equality, and the promotion of women’s economic rights with a focus on addressing the skills and information barriers that can contribute to the economic empowerment of out of school adolescent girls, teenage mothers and young women in the sustainable energy value chains at the informal and micro-levels in selected districts of Tanzania Mainland and Zanzibar.

Globally, about 1.3 billion people lack access to electricity and nearly 3 billion use solid biomass for cooking, lighting and heating homes. For Tanzania, available information suggests that for the past decade about 90 percent of total energy supply was derived from biomass, consumed mainly in the form of fuelwood and charcoal. The use of modern sources of energy for cooking (for example electricity or gas) is very uncommon and in rural areas about 99% of the households use either firewood (81%) or charcoal (18%) for cooking and only about 10% of households use electricity for lighting. Use of wood based fuels for cooking predominate for two main reasons: the lack or limited availability of modern cooking and lighting energy alternatives and inability of the majority of low to middle income households to afford the cost of the available alternative cooking and lighting energy sources, which is relatively higher than the cost of wood and charcoal.

While women make up more than 50% of those owning or operating informal, micro, small, and medium enterprises in Tanzania, women are disproportionately represented in the informal and micro levels. This disproportionate representation in the lower levels of the economic activity is due to the combined effects of women’s skill gaps in entrepreneurship, financial management, business formalization, access to finance, value addition, and trade; women’s abilities to form profitable partnerships along the value chain; and women’s abilities to engage with the regulatory environment such as business formalization processes at the local level.  The programme will target out of school adolescent girls, teenage mothers and young women and will address the skills and knowledge gaps, specifically entrepreneurial and technical skills, that they to need engage in the sustainable energy value chains.

Programme Focus

Through this call for proposals UN Women invites applications from NGOs and CSOs with a strong track record in gender equality and the empowerment of women. Such organisations will have a proven capacity to develop and implement a programme to build the technical and entrepreneurial skills and knowledge of out of school adolescent girls, teenage mothers and young women to enable them to earn livelihoods from sustainable energy value chains both as entrepreneurs or as technical service providers.

The overall objectives of the programme are 1) Formal and non-formal TVET and entrepreneurial skills development opportunities provision for livelihoods development by out of school adolescent girls, teenage mothers and young women out of school increased; 2) Economic empowerment of out of school adolescent girls, teenage mothers and young women in selected communities promoted.

Proposed intervention(s)

The envisages five (5) key components to be implemented by either one or more organizations or in partnership in which case they will have to show proof of the partnership at the time of submitting the proposals and clear indication of responsibilities/lead role. The indicated budget estimates are for a 1-year period and interested CSOs/NGOs are expected to submitted covering this period.

With an overall outcome of Women, especially the poorest and most excluded, are economically empowered and benefit from development, proposals should address any of the following components:

• Component 1: Support the development of relevant and sustainable technical vocational training in the area of sustainable energy based on local resources, market analyses and value chain promotion for out of school adolescent girls, teenage mothers and young women.
• Component 2: Support the development of internship programmes or placements with enterprises for out of school adolescent girls, teenage mothers and young women
• Component 3: Support national and sub-national efforts to provide technical and vocational skills development opportunities in green business to out of school adolescent girls, teenage mothers and young women
• Component 4: Strengthen the capacity of out of school adolescent girls, teenage mothers and young women to start up local resource-based creative industry and green business livelihoods.
• Component 5: Mobilize local government, communities and private sector for support of start-up businesses of out of school adolescent girls, teenage mothers and young women

The Call for Proposals encourages innovative approaches and partnerships to economically empower out of school adolescent girls, teenage mothers and young women with low levels of literacy in the targeted communities to participate in sustainable energy value chains. Such initiatives will focus on ensuring adaption and adoption of technical vocational training targeted to out of school adolescent girls, teenage mothers and young women based on their specific needs. The Call for proposals also aims at providing out of school adolescent girls, teenage mothers and young women exposure to the operations of an established entity to understand the products and business practices of the sector. The submitted projects will include all aspects of business orientation, market access/market information and general aspects of enterprise development. In addition, beneficiaries will be trained on group formation and strengthening with a result on peer-to-peer learning and networking.

The Call for proposals encourages NGOs that have a proven capacity to develop and implement economic empowerment programmes for young women entrepreneurs with a focus on technical and entrepreneurship capacity building in sustainable energy value chains. The Call for proposals includes building awareness of government, communities and private sector to include out of school adolescent girls, teenage mothers and young women in their procurement and distributor networks including buying and selling from their enterprises, acquiring services from them, extending credit to them and fostering an enabling environment.