Saint-Louis: The PRDC-VFS organizes women into a network to strengthen economic autonomy

The Senegal River Valley Community Resilience and Development Project (PRDC-VFS) brought together the main women's organizations in its area of operation in Saint-Louis for a regional consultation workshop. The objective is to establish a network of women's groups in order to strengthen their structure, pool their efforts, and improve the impact of actions promoting their economic empowerment.

As part of its strategy to support community development and economic inclusion, the Senegal River Valley Community Resilience and Development Project (PRDC-VFS) organised a regional consultation workshop dedicated to the establishment of a network of women's groups in the Senegal River Valley.

This meeting brought together representatives of women's organizations from the Saint-Louis, Matam, and Tambacounda regions, as well as institutional stakeholders committed to promoting women's entrepreneurship. The aim is to unite the various women's organizations within a common framework for consultation in order to strengthen their effectiveness and capacity for action.

According to Mamadou Diédhiou, coordinator of PRDC-VFS, this initiative falls under the third sub-component of the project, dedicated to supporting women's organizations present in the intervention area.

“We have already carried out significant diagnostic work with partner NGOs in the regions of Saint-Louis, Matam and Tambacounda. This work has allowed us to create a database of existing women's organizations. However, it is difficult to work individually with each organization. That is why we felt it necessary to organize this workshop in order to consider the establishment of a network capable of uniting these different structures,” he explained.

The coordinator emphasized that the Senegal River Valley already has a dynamic organizational structure for women's empowerment. The challenge now is to strengthen this dynamic through better structuring and more effective coordination of actions.

“We are not starting from scratch. There are already groups and organizations that benefit from various forms of support. Our objective is to see what strategies can be put in place to better organize them and increase the effectiveness of interventions on the ground,” he added.

Beyond the creation of the network, the workshop also aims to identify the priority needs of women's organizations in terms of support, capacity building and access to economic opportunities.

Present at the meeting, Ms. Absa Sané, head of the division of women's organizations at the Directorate of Women's Economic Empowerment at the Ministry of Family, Social Action and Solidarity, welcomed an initiative that is perfectly consistent with the State's guidelines for promoting women's leadership.

“Organizing women into networks is an essential step. There are many organizations and grouping them together allows them to pool their efforts, strengthen their visibility and have representative interlocutors capable of conveying the concerns of a large number of women,” she said.

She also noted that economic empowerment is one of the central missions of her department, which works to promote women's entrepreneurship and improve women's access to economic resources.

Through this initiative, the PRDC-VFS intends to create a sustainable framework for collaboration between women's organizations in the Senegal River Valley, with the ambition of making the network a lever for local development, community resilience and the economic empowerment of women.