Digital for Girls and Women (D4GW) — Enabel's Solar-Powered Digital Centres and Skills Training for Rural Women in Burkina Faso's Centre-Est

Digital for Girls and Women (D4GW) was a €2.25 million Enabel pilot running in Belgium, Burkina Faso and Uganda, aimed at the economic empowerment of women through digital tools. In Burkina Faso it built on the earlier Paas Panga project and a December 2023 needs assessment that called for training adapted to illiterate and rural women.
Two centres (Collège Marie Reine and Maison de la Femme) were each equipped with 20 desktop computers, 10 tablets, a projector and a printer, with solar power; internet was connected in January 2024. Digital-skills training (digital marketing, enterprise management, social media, leadership) ran September-December 2024 in Tenkodogo and Koupéla, with a train-the-trainers component, plus a digital-rights campaign, radio sessions and songs in local languages, and an awareness session reaching 300 girls.
The independent final evaluation (Technopolis Africa, June 2025) reports that 720 women completed digital-skills training across Uganda and Burkina Faso, that all participating saleswomen in Burkina Faso now publish their products online, and that one beneficiary in Koupéla raised monthly turnover from 25,000-50,000 FCFA to more than 150,000 FCFA (at least threefold). These are focus-group and interview findings, not a controlled impact study.
The evaluation is candid about weaknesses: the project started over a year late, staff turnover caused gaps, the monitoring framework was populated only occasionally, many local activities were undocumented, gender-disaggregated data were not captured systematically, no sustainability strategy was written, budget cuts of about €250,000 meant some activities would not be completed, and insecurity in Burkina Faso could undermine the results.

Read the full analysis: https://open.enabel.be/en/evaluation/23/download/96