Proven approaches for women’s economic empowerment: Technical brief from Women Entrepreneurs Act in Cambodia

WE Act, a USAID-funded, five-year program in Cambodia that ran from 2019 to 2023, worked to support young women in Cambodia’s urban centers to realize their path toward empowerment and success as entrepreneurs and leaders in their communities. WE Act became one of Pact’s foremost programs promoting women’s economic empowerment (WEE), piloting innovative approaches for women that would lead to their sustainable economic empowerment. These interventions included a successful pioneer attempt at partnering with formal financial institutions to provide business loans to young women entrepreneurs, with WE Act serving as the loan guarantor.

This technical brief examines WE Act’s approaches to WEE work, details the successes the program saw specifically in its Access to Finance work, and compares these approaches to Pact’s WORTH model, another WEE approach often used in livelihoods programming, to examine the opportunities to combine these two approaches.

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