Within Ethiopia's overall development strategy, the Integrated Women's Empowerment Programme (IWEP) aims to develop, test and implement a comprehensive nationwide approach to empower women and their households in selected areas of all regions/national states of Ethiopia. The programme provides functional literacy education and livelihood skills training plus a package of economic support and related training to members of groups of women in poor districts of Ethiopia. Those women are expected to benefit from increased self-reliance, self-confidence, and their enhanced status in the family and community and it is assumed that through the programme the livelihoods and thus the poverty situation of these women and their households are improved and their vulnerability reduced. It is also expected that the capacity to plan, participate or undertake and manage development interventions at community levels will be strengthened across different administrative levels ranging from the community to the central level. The IWEP primarily aims at developing and testing a new integrated approach for sustainable livelihood of women as well as for adult education at national level. Thus the emphasis is not so much on large figures or numbers to be trained or included in the programme than on developing models of good practice or appropriate well working solutions for one of the most striking problems in Ethiopia. However, the newly established structures and models are expected to form the basis of a national adult education system with special emphasis on women in the country. The IWEP is being implemented by "dvv international" Regional Office East Africa/Horn of Africa in cooperation with the federal Ministry of Education (MoE) and a great number of national partners within the nine regional states and two city administrations. Funds have been provided since mid 2006 by the government of the Netherlands via the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Addis Ababa for a period of five years based on a comprehensive proposal prepared by the regional director of "dvv international" (Sandhaas, 2006). Negotiations and preparations with the federal government and different ministries have taken some time until an agreement could be signed, the IWEP officially introduced to the regional states at the end of 2007 and implementation started in April 2008. The following text describes the IWEP by, (a) providing an overview of the national and partly international background against which the programme was developed, (b) justifying the need and the decision for a women specific and an integrated adult education approach, (c) explaining objectives and results expected from the IWEP, (d) describing organisational, institutional and implementation arrangements of this size and scale, and (e) mentioning some of the major challenges foreseeable at the beginning of the implementation.