Community Outreach: Women’s Ambassador Groups (WAGs) & Financial Inclusion
RefuSHE’s impact extends far beyond our campus in Nairobi. Our mission in the community is to advance dialogue and create solutions for the protection of unaccompanied urban refugee girls and women. This includes our community outreach and education work to help refugee girls and women in refugee communities across Nairobi access financial and protection services.
When refugee women come to Kenya seeking a better future, they must be resourceful and creative when it comes to financial stability. In Kenya, refugee women are excluded from the formal labor and financial sectors, forcing them to make a living in the informal sector. Many women run their own microenterprises. However, they are limited in their ability to grow and sustain their businesses due to a lack of access to formal financial tools and services like bank accounts and loans, restrictions on identity card requirements, limited access to vocational skills training, and a dearth of refugee-friendly service providers. Refugee women also face unique psychosocial household vulnerabilities due to their status as refugees. As a result, they remain trapped in a cycle of poverty and are vulnerable to ongoing sexual and gender-based violence.
RefuSHE’s Women Ambassador Groups (WAGs) have been the foundation of our organization’s community engagement work since 2014. The WAGs program addresses the myriad social and economic barriers preventing urban refugee women from transcending poverty and social marginalization, ultimately supporting their integration into the Kenyan economy and society. Women’s Ambassador Groups act as both savings and self-help groups and are a means for emotional and financial support. WAGs members can access small loans for their microbusiness via capital that RefuSHE invests and group savings that members collectively decide to loan to each other. In exchange, WAGs members serve as protection advocates and foster care parents to vulnerable refugee girls living in their community, as well as business mentors to young refugee women transitioning out of RefuSHE’s programs.
RefuSHE currently supports over 400 refugee women in 12 different WAGs groups across Nairobi’s urban refugee communities. RefuSHE provides every woman who receives a loan with targeted and specific business coaching to ensure her success. This one-to-one modality creates a safe space for women to open up about their overall household financial picture and business performance which allows RefuSHE’s team to advise women on ways to increase household financial stability.
Earlier this year, RefuSHE began partnering with GiveDirectly to provide unconditional cash transfers to urban refugee women looking to invest in their own microbusinesses. RefuSHE’s partnership with Equity Bank has also allowed 400+ refugee women to open their own bank accounts, a feat not easily accomplished by refugees who face limited access to formal financial products and services. Today, RefuSHE and GiveDirectly are prepared to provide cash transfers to those 400+ bank account-holding WAGs members, a huge accomplishment in our broader effort to support the financial inclusion and economic resilience of refugee women in Nairobi.