Our Work

SEE Change conducted an Empowered Entrepreneur Training (EET) trainer certification program for US Peace Corps Community Economic Development (CED) staff from nine countries* and supported their efforts to train Peace Corps Volunteers and community organizations. Peace Corps’ CED programs have a specific focus on women and youth entrepreneurship and maintain longstanding relationships with local communities. This partnership has enabled SEE Change to evaluate its personal agency approach. This includes research in Uganda where 90 youth were trained as part of a pilot RCT to identify the impacts of EET participation for aspiring and established youth entrepreneurs.  In the words of one Peace Corps trainer who participated in the program: “Whereas I initially thought I had achieved most of what I want to achieve in life, the [EET visioning] activities help me to see even further. Having these activities will help our trainees, especially women entrepreneurs, to think deeper about their life goals.”  *The nine participating countries were Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Georgia, Namibia, Paraguay, Peru, Senegal, and Uganda.

As part of USAID's Women in Waste’s Economic Empowerment (WWEE) Activity under CCBO, SEE Change developed a customized curriculum module based on the Empowered Entrepreneur Training for solid waste management (SWM) entrepreneurs in the Philippines and Indonesia. SEE Change has certified and supported trainers at CCBO grantee organizations in using this curriculum (e.g, providing coaching, agenda planning and facilitation tips) as they design and roll out the training program for over 500 SWM entrepreneurs across the two countries.

In partnership with USAID's Engendering Industries program, SEE Change has certified and supported over 25 trainers from the national utility companies in Mozambique and Malawi to pilot the Empowered Employee Training program companywide. These pilots, which will bring greater awareness of how gender stereotypes and biases limit women’s advancement in male dominated sectors, will inform future phases of work with additional Engendering Industries partners. A certified trainer from Mozambique's utility company, EDM, shared that the greatest benefit of the program was “to know myself, by drawing my tree of life. To find out how stereotypes can make a woman’s professional growth difficult.” SEE Change is also supporting Engendering Industries to integrate personal agency approaches into an accelerated professional course for energy sector professionals from over 30 countries.

In support of the Powering Agriculture Energy Grand Challenge for Development (PAEGC), a multi-donor effort including USAID that supported the development and deployment of clean energy solutions for agriculture, SEE Change certified 26 trainers from PAEGC innovator companies working in East and West Africa and South Asia in the Empowered Entrepreneur Training (EET). These certified trainers delivered EET training content to their sales teams in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic,, helping them to develop resilience, self-awareness and proactiveness in the face of market changes and challenges. One trainer remarked, “Our sales agents were shocked when they weren’t pushed to sell, but rather examine their internal limitations…There was a greater ease of communication built during the session(s) in terms of being able to approach each other, talk to each other... It made a hell of a difference.”

SEE Change conducted a trainer certification program for the Jamaican national electric utility, Jamaica Public Service (JPS), among other service providers, to deliver the Empowered Entrepreneur Training (EET) as part of its community engagement work in low-resource communities. JPS certified trainers went on to support 51 entrepreneurs who own and operate businesses like cookshops, snack/juice shops, groceries, and salons to complete the EET program and participate in a Build Your Business Expo that linked entrepreneurs with financial resources, formalization support and other types of critical business support services. Since the project ended around 90 additional entrepreneurs have so far been trained by certified trainers after the project end. Participating entrepreneurs reported a 3-fold increase in monthly income at endline, as well as an increase in their number of businesses and number of employees. One participant explained “I felt motivated to the point where after the training I open[ed] up two more small businesses.”