LCCP creates an environment that encourages rural women's increased participation in decision-making through the provision of child-care facilities at meetings and holding meetings at hours compatible with family schedules.
LCCP also develops and promotes personal skills training sessions for rural women on leadership, public speaking, decision-making, and self-assertion.
LCCP creates new channels for enabling women to have an input into the decision-making process by promoting participatory approaches and involving women's groups and associations in decision-making processes at all levels.
The level of decision-making power of women in the household has increased now; it is changing from medium to high base on our current engagement with women and men in the respective households. The increased level of decision-making power of women in the household is a result of the experiences gained from Living Peace Methodology (LPM) Spousal meetings and dialogue forums.
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Women play an integral part in agricultural production, as subsistence farmers, cash crop growers, food processors, and livestock owners, among other roles. It follows that empowering women will impact the agricultural markets overall.
Recently, many development organizations have begun to integrate gender into their agricultural development projects. While this new generation of projects is too recent to provide evidence of the long-term impacts of targeting women in agriculture, this project seeks to identify interventions that are having operational success on the ground. For example, these successful projects are recruiting and training female participants.
Drawing on a range of experiences from current interventions, this project seeks to identify strategies that are most effective in targeting women and that have the potential to economically empower women in the agricultural sector around the Loma Mountain communities
Over the years, we have over 50 women that has been engaging in different agricultural projects to serve as livelihood and source of income to help pay school fees for their children within the communities.
All our projects target women groups at different points in the agricultural production system and at different levels of integration into the market economy. Some of the targeted women are already marketing their produce, others are among the most marginalized women.
We emphasized the importance of farmers’ groups as sources of social and economic empowerment; women’s financial inclusion via loans, savings, and asset ownership; harvesting, processing, and storage technologies that ease women’s time burdens or work with women’s schedules; and training that are accessible to women in location, instructor, time commitment, and delivery. However, the right tools are just one aspect of a successful project.
The most effective interventions used several of these tools to create integrated approaches. Contrary to common belief, evidence suggests that women’s empowerment may increase the risks of gender-based violence, at least in the short term.
This was also borne out by the rigorous Gender-Based Violence (GBV) risk assessment we recently undertook in the context of the Sierra Leone for Women Project (SLFWP).
In our research, we asked ourselves; would a focus on women’s social and economic empowerment increase risks of gender-based violence in Sierra Leone? What would be the causal factors? What measures could form part of the project design to address these risks from and to the project?
For 2020, LCC has established groups in a bid to strengthen all operations of women within the project. The project has recorded some economic changes because most of the women within the project who initially started the project with VSLA have also started new businesses from the proceeds from the VSLA.
The changes on the business calendar in the communities affect the project because of the time for some project activities some members will be out on their business trips like attending market days (Luma), during this period initial project schedule would be some time changed to a time where all members will be available.
The current climate system in the project setting is affecting crop yields. We recorded unexpected yields from our vegetable garden because of loose environmental situations within project locations, but we have engaged women on rights project attitude on cultivation and encouraged women to carry out vegetable work on actual Agricultural planting calendar.
Our women have increased knowledge to engage and influence women`s social interaction at the community level, though sometimes restrained by some community men, they have developed increased skills to overcome these challenges through their dialogue and advocacy engagements. We are consolidating established structures of the project and making links with stakeholders to support the functions of the women`s groups.
LCCP-SL engages with partners who affirm all communities’ dignity and potential and share collective responsibilities in ensuring that we raise the dignity and welfare of communities nationwide. The inherent principles that guide LCCP SL’s work equally guide our partnership development
