Yegenew Sanitary Services Cooperative — Disability-Led Women's Enterprise in Addis Ababa

The Federation of Ethiopian National Association of Persons with Disabilities (FENAPD) proposed a sanitary-services enterprise for the World Bank's Development Marketplace Competition, winning one of 186 prizes chosen from over 2,700 submissions. The resulting Yegenew (Yenegew Sew) Sanitary Services Cooperative was founded in the early 2000s within a longer-running ILO-Irish Aid partnership with FENAPD.

Build economically sustainable, disability-led enterprise employment for people with disabilities, while channelling seed funding into microfinance access for women with disabilities.

The cooperative built shower and laundry facilities at some 30 sites across Addis Ababa, staffed entirely by people with disabilities. The wider ILO-Irish Aid-FENAPD partnership also seeded the Gasha Microfinance Institution, and a separate strand, the Tigray Disabled Veterans' Association, connected people with disabilities to mainstream microfinance credit.

An ILO/OECD DAC case study documented that the cooperative's roughly 180-250 initial employees saw wages rise from about USD 8 to USD 50 a month over four years. A later UN Ethiopia account, marking the partnership's 25th anniversary, reports that more than 1,000 family members now derive livelihoods from the enterprise, and that ILO-facilitated microfinance seeding enabled hundreds of women with disabilities to start their own microbusinesses. The related Tigray strand connected over 1,600 people with disabilities to microfinance credit.

The evidence base is real but not rigorous: the two main sources disagree on the founding year (2003 vs. 2004) and initial headcount (180 vs. 250), both are programmatic accounts by the implementing agencies (ILO, OECD, UN country office) rather than independent academic evaluations, there is no control group or disaggregated survey of outcomes specifically for women with disabilities, and most of the strongest quantitative data is over a decade old.