Emmanuel’s Table, a faith-based charity that seeks to inspire, empower and equip women with life and value-based business skills required to cope with life’s challenges and serve as exemplary change agents in their local communities has concluded plans to do what they know how to do best- Women Empowerment.
In the spirit of the forthcoming festive season in December 2021, The Prayer Network has identified their target this year and ready to empower 100 women across the slums of Lagos and thus seeks a partnership with Emmanuel’s Table respectively.
Information available to us revealed that Project “Impacting 100” will support two categories of women who must be residents of Lagos state in the following categorization; Forty (40) women with funding to start small businesses and Sixty (60) young women with Tuition Fees and who must be undergraduates of one of the federal tertiary institutions in Nigeria.
We aim to empower women financially so they can attain a higher self-worth, a voice that is heard while enjoying meaningful participation in economic decision-making especially on the home-front, disclosed a member of the charity.
Since its launch, Emmanuel’s Table has supported over 1000 plus women, with success stories of 100% return on investment from the initial seed investment awarded in a 12-18 months period, with some of our beneficiaries becoming employers of labour.
Emmanuel’s Table is the charity arm of The Prayer Network, (TPN), a Faith Based Organization and a gathering of women who are passionate about empowering women across the nation in across all spheres of life.
According to one of the stakeholders, she said “We would like to ask you to support this initiative by partnering with us towards the realization of our 2021-year end initiative tagged “Impacting 100”. And, we believe this partnership will offer sufficient mileage to Emmanuel’s Table for the anticipated great achievement.
However, due to our hard stance on transparency, the pre-selection process will have four screening levels:
- The call for application which is the first level will be open to the general public with robust social media campaigns conducted over the course of six weeks.
- Subsequent screenings will be carried out by a selection team
- The final screening will be a face-to-face interview.
- There will also be a one-day pre-event training for all shortlisted beneficiaries which will focus on training the women on Enterprise, Employability and Entrepreneurship skills. Importantly, attendance at this training is a condition to receiving the grant.
More so, a sustainability component has also been introduced which is a mentoring and handholding programme to manage and measure the business performance of the SME under this initiative over an agreed period.
The undergraduates will also be mentored through a Big Sister mentorship approach.
The objectives of the Enterprise, Employability and Entrepreneur Skills Programme are:
• To equip womenequip women starting small businesses with the essentials of running a micro enterprise such as keeping records, separating business finance from personal funds, understanding the financial environment better, tips on growing businesses amongst others.
• To begin to inspire and equip, at an early stage, younger women in the Universities across the state on the anatomy, mind-set and processes involved in becoming a successful entrepreneur or corporate woman.
The talk of the town event is scheduled to hold on the 11th of December 2021 in Lagos, Nigeria for all the short-listed women to gather and get value from the empowerment.
We recall from the background of the charity initiative that women empowerment is undeniably at the core of national and international economic development. According to the United Nations, empowering women in the economy has been identified as one of the keys to achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and attaining at least six of the Sustainable Development Goals; including ending poverty and reducing inequality.
Studies have further shown that boosting female entrepreneurship and employability activities are avenues to GDP growth. However, in almost all developing countries, including Nigeria, women’s early-stage entrepreneurial activity is half or less than half of that of men and women are less likely to be entrepreneurs and therefore face more disadvantages starting a business.
Interventions such as providing access to finance and access to business education have been proven to elevate the level of active participation of women in economic activities which is basically the focus of Emmanuel’s Table to achieve it aims and objectives respectively..
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