Our Economic Recovery programs help widows, and their households achieve lasting self-reliance and resilience. We work to ensure that every widow can meet essential needs and recover from shocks, all while building the capacity to produce for self-consumption or generate income with dignity and safety. Our approach weaves together social, cultural, political, and environmental factors to strengthen economic livelihoods.

Three Key Sub-Sectors of Economic Recovery

The overall sector objective is achieved via three interconnected sub-sectors, namely:

• Food Security

Food security activities ensure that widows at individual and household levels have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and quality food. Achieving food security outcomes fundamentally requires a holistic, integrated multi-sectoral approach. GGF’s Economic Recovery programming contributes to achieving Food Security through a combination of two broad categories of intervention:

1. Demand-Side Initiatives: Interventions that support the capacity of widows at individual and household levels to meet their basic food needs by ensuring that they have both the economic means to access foods (e.g. through consumption support) and the physical means to access relevant commodity markets;
2. Supply-Side Initiatives: interventions that ensure that critical market systems and value chains that support basic food needs are functional, resilient to shocks, and responsive to needs in crisis or natural calamity contexts (e.g. through support to regenerative practices in local agricultural production and natural resource management).

• Financial Inclusion

Financial inclusion activities ensure that widows and businesses have effective access to useful, affordable, and adapted financial products and services (e.g. transactions, payments, savings, credit, loans, and insurance) and that these financial products and services are delivered in a responsible, inclusive and sustainable way. GGF’s Economic Recovery programming contributes to achieving Financial Inclusion through a combination of two types of interventions:

1. Demand-Side Initiatives: Offering financial literacy training and support to build understanding and access to vital financial tools.
2. Supply-Side Initiatives: Partnering with both formal institutions (like banks and microfinance providers) and informal networks (such as village savings associations) to ensure that financial services are accessible and adapted to the unique needs of widows.

• Decent Livelihoods

Decent livelihoods activities ensure that widows at individual and household levels have the means to cover their needs and the needs of their household through diversified income streams stemming from sustainable and decent work.

 Livelihoods interventions are about protecting, replacing or facilitating access of vulnerable widows to (human, physical, financial, social, natural) resources that they can use to subsist and/or generate an income.

GGF recognises that all sources of livelihoods are not equally desirable and promotes the development of diversified livelihoods opportunities that are decent and sustainable, whether in formal or informal labour markets.

As an intermediary step, GGF’s livelihoods interventions can also comprise emergency livelihoods interventions that facilitate access to immediate, temporary income through wage employment opportunities or other income-generating activities.

GGF’s Economic Recovery programming contributes to achieving sustainable and decent livelihoods through a combination of two types of interventions:

1. Demand-Side Initiatives: Building human and social capital with tailored training, skills development, and access to critical resources like tools and equipment widows effectively access agricultural and non-agricultural labour markets, either through wage employment or self-employment.
2. Supply-Side Initiatives: Generating decent and sustainable employment opportunities for vulnerable populations through:
   1. Supporting micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) that are starting up or scaling up their activities to grow and generate jobs.
   2. Collaborating with the private sector to develop robust market systems and value chains that are conducive to inclusive employment of people of concern by supporting, strengthening, or developing specific actors, infrastructures, support functions, norms, and regulations.

• Promoting decent work by partnering with employers to ensure sustainable, fair labor opportunities.