From Income to Influence: How 600+ Women in Kampala Took a Step Towards Financial Freedom

May 8, 2026

On 30 April 2026, a gathering of 300 career and professional women including another 300+ participating online were tackling an engagement that doesn't happen often enough. A frank, practical, and energising conversation about money.

The inaugural SheCountsWomen's Finance Fair co-hosted by UNDP Uganda and Centenary Bank was not a seminar about abstract economic policy. It was a conversation about seizing opportunities to build agency from income, to growth wealth and freedoms associated with it, and to act against factors that often drive gender based violence.

Female speaker at podium on stage with purple banner about income, influence, wealth, power.

"When women and girls have access to income, savings, credits and assets, they gain the power to make choices about their safety, relationships and future." H.E. Frederieke Quispel, Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

The members of the #WomenUganda2025+ campaign, under which the finance fair was being mounted, including Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Ireland, and colleagues from UN agencies including UNAIDS and UNFPA and corresponding Male Changemakers were all in the room. Providing a well rounded conversation and the recognition that women's financial inclusion was a human rights imperative.

The Journey From Income to Security

The UNDP Uganda Resident Representative Ms. Nwanneakolam Vwede-Obahor while opening the Fair recognized that economic participation is not the same as economic empowerment; and that income is not the same as financial security. "Financial capability is not a privilege. It is a right," she said. "Yet for far too many women in Uganda and across the world, that right remains constrained by gender-based violence, economic exclusion and systems that have long undervalued women's agency."

Speaker at podium in front of pink backdrop with UNDP and United Nations banners.

She pointed to the evidence demonstrating that GBV reduces global GDP by about 2% per year, a loss of more than USD 1.6 trillion annually. Her reflections emphasized that financial empowerment was not just a women's issue, but that it was also an economic one. She further cited that it was demonstrable that women who participated in financial literacy programmes combined with small business grants were significantly less likely to experience coercive control. In Kenya, GBV survivors who received structured financial coaching were three times more likely to start a business within 18 months and more than 60 percent said economic empowerment was the single factor that made it possible to leave an abusive relationship and not return. Leaving was not the barrier. Surviving after leaving was.

"From income to influence is not a slogan," she told the room. "It is a journey. One that begins with a single, deliberate step."