Breaking the Mold

WORTH is based on the premise that dependency is not empowering. Unlike many development programs that provide participants with capital and a variety of inputs needed for program delivery, WORTH offers no seed money, no matching grants, no subsidized interest rates and no classroom teachers. Anchored in the belief that hand-outs are unsustainable and demoralizing, WORTH encourages women to discover that they already possess the strength and resources to change their lives. What WORTH does provide is an opportunity for women to equip themselves with tools to build self-reliance and to find support in each other. Because WORTH places primary responsibility for success on the women, it reaches large scale in a short time. Women can replicate the program themselves, harnessing their skills, confidence and energy to help start new groups without outside assistance.

WORTH women become bankers and lenders of loan funds that they own and manage themselves. Most microfinance programs start by providing external credit, which is lent to borrowers by the institutions' loan officers. In WORTH, women mobilize their own capital to build a loan fund through weekly savings. They lend to each other, carrying out transactions without the assistance of an external loan officer. By learning basic literacy, math and accounting skills, members maintain accurate records and establish checks and balances that assure their funds are safe. Moreover, since women own their village banks, the interest they pay stays with the group, allowing its capital to grow rapidly or to be distributed as dividends.

WORTH women focus on success. Development programs typically focus on women's problems and the obstacles they must overcome. Through an approach known as Appreciative Planning and Action, WORTH women look at their achievements, their strengths, and their remarkable capacities to cope with adversity. WORTH has discovered that if women look for problems, they find and create more problems; if they look for success, they find and create more success.

WORTH reaches rural areas that most microfinance institutions (MFIs) cannot penetrate. Despite their success at providing financial services to millions of the world's poor, most MFIs have not reached rural regions on a wide scale. Since their complex financial structures require extensive program staff to train clients and deliver services, traditional MFIs tend to focus on areas where clients are easier to reach and are geographically concentrated. WORTH, by contrast, can take root in regions where other programs cannot or will not provide financial services. Through a model of decentralized, grassroots control, WORTH women learn to provide financial services to each other and to build on their own resources.

See the impact evaluation of the Nepal program, Pact's Women's Empowerment Program in Nepal: A Savings-and Literacy-Led Alternative to Financial Institution Building [PDF], for examples of this phenomenon.