Women ending poverty: WORTH notes from the field

One Lap of America - WORTH car finished 4th!

A US friend of WORTH - Carl Warren - has a passion for racing cars. Every year he takes part in the One Lap of America race and "spotlights" a non-profit organization on his race car. This year WORTH was the featured program and great exposure it got! Not only was our logo featured prominently on the hood of the car, but Carl invited his friends to make donations to the WORTH program! The One Lap event was a great opportunity to expose the WORTH program to more people and Carl managed to score an overall 4th place. Congratulations to Carl and congratulations to WORTH!

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