Women bear the overwhelming burden of the global HIV/AIDS epidemic, especially in low- resource countries like Kenya where women experience many social and economic disadvantages. Because HIV/AIDS and poverty are so closely connected, programs that hope to improve HIV outcomes for women in Kenya must also improve their economic opportunities in order to be successful.

In Kenya, one example of a unique program addressing HIV/AIDS among vulnerable women is called the Women’s Equality Empowerment Project or “WEEP.” The WEEP program is a faith-based initiative to empower mothers living with HIV/AIDS who have been widowed or abandoned (typically after they learned they were HIV-positive) and are living in extreme poverty—which is defined as an income of less than $1 USD per day. The WEEP program is 18 months long, and mothers progress in a small cohort of other women through three program phases. In the Stabilization phase, the program provides food, HIV medications, housing, and other basic needs to help get mothers—who may be quite ill at enrollment—to regain the physical health needed to participate in activities at the local WEEP center. During the Skills Development phase, mothers receive training to develop income-generating skills such as sewing or soap making while also building literacy and numeracy skills. In the Sustainability phase, mothers gain financial and entrepreneurial skills and modest start-up funds so that they can launch a microbusiness to support themselves and their children for the future. When they complete the WEEP program, mothers participate in a graduation ceremony to recognize how far they’ve come (see the Video Gallery page to see what a WEEP graduation ceremony is like!).

Health Education Africa Resource Team (HEART), the organization that sponsors the WEEP program, could tell that WEEP was having an impact from watching the remarkable transformations of women who had participated over the years. But they needed a formal program evaluation to be conducted in order to:

1. find out whether WEEP was successfully improving all outcomes as hoped or just some of them,
2. learn whether WEEP was having a bigger impact on some kinds of participants compared to others (such as older versus younger mothers or those from rural versus urban areas), and
3. get the kind of research evidence about the program’s effect that grant funders want to see.

In collaboration with HEART, I conducted a study in three parts. First, I did in-depth interviews with mothers in the WEEP program and recent WEEP graduates to learn how their lives had changed because of WEEP—and which changes they felt were most meaningful. Second, I worked with WEEP participants and HEART staff to create an assessment tool that could be used to evaluate the impact of WEEP in a consistent way over time. Third, HEART staff started using the new assessment tool to measure mothers’ progress in the program from enrollment to the program mid-point to graduation, and I analyzed the data to see to what extent the program was successful and for which outcomes (such as improving health, increasing economic stability, or building empowerment).

Analysis and write-up of findings is currently underway, but the results so far are very promising and suggest that the WEEP program is working well. Early results are also suggesting that WEEP could be applicable to other settings and countries where women experience the dual disadvantage of increased HIV rates and barriers to economic stability.

(This summary will be updated once results are finalized)

We could only include mothers who were in the WEEP program in this research, so the results are not as strong as they would have been with a control group (mothers living with HIV in extreme poverty who were not in WEEP). It’s possible that some other supports in women’s lives may have also helped them improve over time in addition to the improvement they experienced from WEEP. Also, while we hope the results of this research can shed light on whether WEEP could be successful in other settings, it’s also possible that the experiences of mothers in this study wouldn’t be applicable to women in other countries.