The economic empowerment of women in situations of social vulnerability helps to transform their realities and their surroundings and is a mechanism for promoting gender equity.

The Association Support Group for Needy Communities (AGACC), with support from the Toyota Foundation, seeks to change the reality of women living in vulnerable communities on the periphery, in Fortaleza (CE), through qualification and training in sewing, basic cooking and entrepreneurship. AGACC is an NGO from Ceará that, since 1985, has been promoting socioeconomic development in the most vulnerable communities in the State, having benefited more than 65 thousand people.

Selected in 2021 in the Toyota Foundation Public Notice, the program focuses on the professional qualification of women in situations of social vulnerability through sewing and cooking workshops. The selected students will also receive guidance on financial organization and entrepreneurship.

The students of the Mulheres em Expressão project will participate in virtual/face-to-face workshops that will help them to develop professional qualifications, in addition to enabling their insertion in the world of work and contributing to the generation and expansion of family income.

The qualification, which will start on March 23, 2022 and is expected to end in July of the same year, will benefit 75 women from Fortaleza. At the end of the course, students who wish to undertake and start their businesses will receive a kit, assembled according to each one’s needs, to help them get started, applying the project’s teachings in a practical way.

The Mulheres em Expressão project is also connected to SDGs 1 (Eradication of Poverty), 4 (Quality Education), 8 (Decent Work, Economic Growth) and 10 (Reducing Inequalities).