Women ending poverty: WORTH notes from the field

Impact in Asia: Program successes from WORTH Cambodia

 "Close to 3,000 women are enrolled in 144 Women’s Empowerment Groups. WORTH participants have saved US$30,273 and made loans of US$24,292 to 1,415 women.

Each group has developed an action plan and rules and, with the assistance of Literacy Volunteers, has worked through the first literacy training book, “Our Group”.

Prior to starting literacy instruction, only 20% of Women’s Empowerment Group members were able to pass a literacy pre test; 75% of Women’s Empowerment Group members passed the literacy test after completing “Our Group”. “Our Group” is at grade level three. Unintended consequences of Women’s Empowerment Groups have included such indicators of empowerment as:

• WORTH members increasingly reporting attendance at local government meetings in their desire to participate in their communities.

• WORTH women running as candidates for the commune councilor election in 2007 with others elected to village chief and deputy village chief positions.

• A Women's Empowerment Group planning to contract with a local nongovernmental organization (NGO) to dig a well in their village with money for the well contributed by WORTH women, and another Women's Empowerment Group planning to contribute half the cost of rebuilding a road in their rural community with local government contributing the other half.

With these successes, more and more women and local authorities in villages nearby existing Women’s Empowerment Groups have requested that NGO partners assist them also to establish a WORTH project. The energy and strength nurtured among WORTH women has been notable during each of the 146 monthly mobile workshops.

These workshops have brought together representatives from each Woman’s Empowerment Group to share experiences and successes and to discuss important issues of importance to their groups or communities. Groups rotate responsibility for organizing the mobile workshops. More than 160 Family days have also been organized by Women’s Empowerment Groups to build support for WORTH among family members, local authorities and villagers. Family day gatherings often involve over 100 participants."

~ Keo Keang, Deputy Director WORTH Cambodia.

For more information about WORTH, please visit our website at: http://www.worthwomen.org

The WORTH Spirit: Nepal

"I am just back from 10 days in Nepal finalizing the planning for a major research effort to find out just what WORTH groups are doing 5 1/2 years after the formal Women's Empowerment Program ended. 

I have been blown away by the stories that I heard while there - stories about WORTH women standing up to police and insurgents alike to defend and protect their group members and their families, women who through their groups have brought community centers, day care facilities, dam projects and phone companies to their villages, women who have responded to the requests of other women to help them start WORTH groups. 

While I felt the pessimism that seems to pervade so many quarters of Nepal in so far as political prospects are concerned, there was none of that when people talked about the WORTH groups in their communities.  The fact that WORTH groups have become the foundation for many other programs in Nepal, programs in a variety of sectors, is a huge testament to the capacity of WORTH women to become pillars in the development of their families and communities. 

Truly, truly there is no stopping WORTH women - economically, politically, socially - once they have had a chance to experience the success and empowerment that WORTH unleashes."

~Marcia Odell
Director, WORTH

For more information about WORTH, please visit our website at: http://www.worthwomen.org

WORTH finds a new home online

Welcome to the WORTH blog! This is our first posting in our new home online and we’re very happy to begin sharing our program’s success stories with a larger audience, namely you!

If you’re unfamiliar with our program, WORTH is a self-help, women’s empowerment program that gives poor women in communities around the world the opportunity to discover their inherent power and capacity to end poverty. Through literacy training, group savings, micro-enterprise development and entrepreneurship, women help each other change their lives. When the vision of each woman is pooled with the vision of others, the group generates energy which forges real change for themselves and for their families and communities.

First piloted in Nepal with 125,000 women, WORTH provides women the opportunity to mobilize their own loan fund through saving together, to lend to each other and collect the interest on their loans, and to grow their micro- and small businesses. As a result the women access two streams of income: one from the profits of their small businesses and one from the distributions paid out to them by their bank.

WORTH now reaches over 75,000 women in Cambodia and six countries in Africa - Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. We hope to reach one million of the world’s poorest women by 2011.

In the future this blog will host stories from the field - both from practitioners and the women themselves and updates from WORTH headquarters in Washington, D.C. We hope you will join us.

For more information about WORTH, please visit our website at: http://www.worthwomen.org