Home | Promote Decent Work in Informal Micro and Small Homebased Women-Led Enterprises and Facilitate their

Promote Decent Work in Informal Micro and Small Homebased Women-Led Enterprises and Facilitate their

September 16, 2020 - "ILO"


Since 2013, FWEAN has been collaborating with ILO to promote women enterprises in formalization and capacity building starting from Way-out of Informality project and this partnership continued in ILO’s Sustainable Global Supply Chain Project in South Asia. 

As part of the work with the project, in 2019, the FWEAN has made some significant progress in terms of registration of new enterprises, awareness on labour laws and its provisions to small and micro home-based enterprises, rolling-out OSH training, and interaction with government and local government about difficulties in the process of registration and its way forward. 

FWEAN’s learning from the experiences were; sector-wise OSH training module is important for bringing awareness on OSH among all sorts of women-led enterprises.  Regular orientation to government officials is important about challenges faced by enterprises in the registration mechanism process, enterprise tax, and annual renewal fee and the provision of social security as well as services from the government is important for creating awareness amongst the enterprises owners and help them be adopted by the enterprises. Likewise mass awareness regarding labour law and social security is important for promoting better working conditions. Documentation of key issues and challenges faced newly registered businesses at the local level will able to provide key action points while working in the transition from informal toward formal enterprises. 

The key activities in this project are in alignment with FWEAN’s thematic areas of operation and the initial activities supported by ILO, especially the following will help FWEAN to have a greater say in engaging with gender sensitive policy design on promoting sustainable women led enterprises;

  • Empowerment of women entrepreneurs: an integrated approach to formalization that allows women MSME owners to access services and schemes to upgrade their enterprises. Enterprises formalization strategy document guide on systematic formalization process and achieve accordingly.  
  • Advocacy and lobbying with government: current project collects evidence on challenges facing women MSMEs will serve as an evidence base to lobby governments at local, provincial and national level. 
  • Information Dissemination and Capacity Building of Women Entrepreneurs: information and discussion on labour law provisions and technical support to deliver improved occupational safety and health, financial literacy and enterprises registration procedures.