Muslim women receive employment help

During this month of Ramadan, Muslim women received funds to address employment hurdles.

The Canadian Council of Muslim Women (CCMW) received a $768,000 fund from the Women and Gender Equality (WAGE). The funding will be used for CCMW’s 35-month-long “Addressing Barriers to Employment for Muslim Women” project.

“The CCMW plays a pivotal role in bringing about systemic change and the funding will help them enhance resources and expertise to create educational materials and tools for employers to adequately address Islamophobia and racism in the workplace,” said Marci Ien, minister for Women and Gender Equality and Youth.

Since 2010, CCMW has received $2.3 million in funding from WAGE.

“We are honoured to receive a multi-year grant from WAGE to better understand employment barriers that Canadian Muslim women face,” CCMW Executive Director Nuzhat Jafri said. “This will help to develop key strategies and tools to address these barriers to inform employment-related policies and practices that will improve employment access and equity.”

In a statement on their website, CCMW said they will launch a Gender-Based Analysis plus (GBA+) lens to gather data that will address gender gaps in the labour market during the first year of the project. It will also determine the economic participation of Canadian Muslim women.

“This doesn’t happen overnight,” said Firdaus Ali, project manager for the Digital Anti-Racism Education program. “We want to make sure the project is relevant. We just don’t want to do a project for the sake of doing it, but we want to make sure that we have key players in the project that are engaged.”

Ali said year two of the project will be spent on the development of strategies and toolkits that will gather data on employment barriers, gender equity, income and other issues. Year three will be spent developing plans based on the toolkits gathered.

“We will develop toolkits in both English and French. It will be shared with policymakers, employers, and recruitment agencies across Canada,” said Ali. “We are going to have a national conference where we are going to showcase or display our learnings through the project.”

Since 2015, more than 645 organizations in Canada have received funds to improve women’s economic security.  According to WAGE, $320 million has been given to address gender-based violence and to support women who needed help.

Canada’s 2022 budget has committed a $539 million budget to implement the National Plan to End Gender-Based violence.