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Women and Families

Here at CAEPA, our mission is to enable families to build their own sustainable environment and thrive within it. To do this, we support vulnerable and marginalized
women and girls to have equal access to resources, information, and knowledge. With this support, they can become independent entrepreneurs within their communities.

CAEPA is a woman-focused, women-led charity and since our inception in 2009, we are proud to have helped many women, girls and their families achieve great things, including helping them become smallholder farmers, educating them on growing and sustaining businesses, enabling them to send their children to school and teaching them (and young boys) about health and relationships.


You can find more information and read about the families we have helped on our website.

As we move into our second decade, the need for your support is ever-present. With your help, we can achieve even more together.


Help us to help them

This year, we are focusing our fundraising efforts in two key areas:


Establishing a micro-credit loan fund

Micro-credit is a small loan fund and a way for women to access capital so they can start their own businesses. The loans enable women to increase their ability to earn a living, improve their lifestyle and more importantly, feel empowered to learn new skills that have a direct positive impact on their lives.


We have already started to establish the fund by training community members on how micro-credit schemes work and how they are run and managed.

Your donation will directly help by:

Giving women an easy, safe and supportive way to start their own business.

Helping women write and develop a business plan that they can work towards and achieve.

Empowering women to take charge of their lives, to feel less marginalized by society and to improve the lives of their families.

Enabling women to buy, for example, seeds for crops and animals for grazing, selling or as food sources, as well as equipment, tools, and materials.

Why micro-loans are vital for women:

The responsibility for various daily activities – preparing meals, fetching and storing water, taking care of children and household hygiene, taking care of dependent people in the family and community (the disabled, the elderly, the sick and orphans) – primarily falls on the shoulders of women and girls.

Women spend an average of 8.2 hours per week more than men on unpaid household tasks. As a result, and because these tasks require significant daily investment, women are particularly affected by the lack of access to income-generating activities.

Women's access to credit in Cameroon is limited and women have extremely restricted access to and control over resources.

Women in Cameroon are more affected by poverty than men. While 39% of the population lives below the poverty line, this rate rises to 51.5% for women. Of these, 79.2% are underemployed.

Women’s limited access to credit restricts them to petty trading. About 80% of economically active women in urban areas are petty (unofficial) traders of some sort, due to the difficulty of obtaining business expansion loans.


2. Vocational training and skill acquisition for young women

An important part of our work is enabling young women and children to have equal access to education and learning.

We continue to help women and girls access education. We are proud to support learning in areas such as bookkeeping, group dynamics, and financial management. We have also been able to offer Saturday literacy classes, writing and read-aloud classes for children. Education on health and relationships is also vital for women and girls and we continue to hold workshops on healthy relationships, reproductive health, and gender equality.

Your donation will directly help by:

Enabling more women and young girls to receive education and broaden their learning and life skills to empower them and awaken their self-belief.

Helping women learn key skills such as tailoring, interior design, hairdressing and computer studies. This not only improves their knowledge but also enables them to start a business to improve their own and their family’s lives.

Reducing inequality and risks for harm and learning about boundaries.