Citizens Economic Empowement The Citizens Economic Act No. 9 of 2006, is principally aimed at uplifting the targeted citizens who have suffered marginalization. It is meant to level the playing field and raise the the citizens to a position where they can effectively participate in the national economy. above all, it is meant to ensure especially the women, youth and physically challenged. Some of the key areas of the Act include the definition of empowerment as a broad based and multifaceted strategy aimed at substantially increasing the participation of targeted citizens at all levels of the population in the economy, fostering wealth creation and significantly decreasing income inequalities. The Act also defines targeted citizens as, "person who is historically marginalised of disadvantaged and whose access to economic resources and development capabilities have been constrained due to various factors including race, sex, educational background, status and disabilities". The objectives of the Act include among others:  1. The establishment of the Citizens Economic Empowerment Commission   2.  Establishment of the Citizens Empowerment Fund  3.  Promoting the empowerment of targeted citizens; and  4.  Promotng investment through fostering joint local and foregn ownership of companies. Section 9 of the Act establishes the Citizen s Economic Fund aimed at supporting the development of broad based empowerment programmes. The Fund will be vested in the Commision but shall be managed and administered by various financial institutions and fund managers. The key components to achieving economic empowerment are the following:  1. Transformation of society in order to ensure sustainable developmement of human resource by recruiting, training and promoting local people into leadership roles in enterprises and thereby building on the full potential facets of the economy;  2. Access to capital necessary to start and build business and funding/local mechanisms for investments;  3. Equity ownership and meaningful control and participation in the means of production coupled with supportive culture, sustainability and the legal framework to support the policy; and  4. Good political and corporate governance by creating predictable, transparent, consistent, accountable and an enabling economic environment. Government will strongly encourage sectors and enterprises to develop Charters that will set out specific CEE targets and outline the plans to achieve targets. The performance in the sectors will be benchmarked against the scorecards, which will be used to measure progress made by enterprises and sectors in achieving the Economic Empowerment of citizens.     [ Back ]