What is WORTH

How WORTH works

WORTH blends the benefits of three integrated approaches: literacy, community banking, and small business development. Each builds upon the other two. As women master the fundamentals of reading and writing, they begin saving together in small groups. Once literate they use their newfound skills to learn how to make loans, start microbusinesses, and transform their savings groups into community banks. As the bank owners and managers, women collect the interest on the loans they make to each other and then distribute it back as dividends to themselves. This gives each woman two income streams: from her microbusiness and her bank, rapidly and dramatically increasing her wealth. Once their banks become established and their businesses grow, they go on to learn critical problem-solving skills to tackle pressing community issues, such as human trafficking, domestic violence, conflict resolution, and HIV/AIDS.

A strikingly simple concept, WORTH implements a sequence of activities that—

• fosters action-oriented, group instructional learning, while women save together in groups of 15-20
• enables women to build transparent savings and credit groups through simple, practical women's village banking
• enables women to borrow from their savings to develop micro-enterprises
• enables women to generate income from their group lending, through interest on loans that remain with the economic group members' control
• reinforces life-saving messages about HIV/AIDS through group learning and discussion as female caregivers learn about issues of stigma, care and support and how to mobilize community resources
• supports women to take charge of improving their lives, families and communities

With support from local NGOs, women form small groups of 20-25 members. Groups are responsible for setting their own meeting rules and electing their own officers. When applicable, Pact recommends that each woman pay a nominal program entrance fee and periodic book fees that can be used to increase the group's savings fund.

Group study

The core of the WORTH model is a two-part book series, Women in Business, that focuses on developing the strong reading and technical skills needed to create savings-led village banks and micro-enterprises. The first book in the series, Our Group, teaches women basic sounds, letters and numbers, and principles for developing strong groups. The second book, Road to Wealth, instructs women on how to set aside mandatory and voluntary savings and use simple math to track the growth of savings; learn responsible lending and borrowing; study basic bookkeeping principles that enable the group to function as a self-sufficient village bank; and gain insight into sound entrepreneurship. A supplementary series of micro-enterprise pamphlets is used in tandem with the core materials to continue to build and develop strong business skills. Since women continue to gather weekly for regular banking meetings, other materials in the areas of rights and advocacy or HIV/AIDS have been successfully introduced and integrated into ongoing group activities. As long as the women are motivated to learn about a topic that is of interest to them, WORTH groups provide a sustainable platform for many types of ongoing educational activities, which leads to action in the community.

Savings-led village banks

When a group begins to save, the amount, which is set by the group, may be as small as three cents per woman per week. Women are highly motivated to save not only because they want to put aside resources, but because their savings generate interest when they are lent out to group members in the form of micro-enterprise loans. Typically, in other microfinance programs, the interest is collected by outside agencies, but in WORTH the interest accrues to the savers. WORTH women therefore have two important income streams: the money they earn through their individual and group enterprises, and the income generated through the dividends distributed back to the group at the close of each banking cycle. Thus no matter how poor a woman may be, the village bank offers a source of income for each woman member/owner/saver.

Microenterprises

When women begin small businesses, they are encouraged to build on what they already know and to gear to local materials and markets. Many women familiar with subsistence farming choose to grow market gardens, raise goats or keep chickens, while others near towns start tea stalls and engage in petty trade. Pact recommends multiple enterprises to spread risk and provide regular income that will enable loan repayment. While it takes time for women to develop this diversity, it increases the sustainability of income generation.

Building a platform for action

WORTH women work together in a group and build close relationships founded on trust and a shared vision for their communities. Together they choose to tackle social issues such as alcoholism, spousal abuse, girl trafficking and child marriages or the stigma associated with HIV. Other groups choose to focus on improving infrastructure, such as local roads, schools and public spaces. Their collective actions are improving the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

An appreciative approach

Looking for success finds and creates more success. Through an approach known as Appreciative Planning and Action, women discover and learn to trust their own knowledge and expertise, as well as their networks with other women's groups. This approach motivates and encourages people, rather than having them become dependent on outside resources. Women discover what it is inside them that they can be proud of and reflect upon a time that they positively affected the life of another. Drawing upon this positive experience, they dream about the future of their community as they design a plan to create this change and deliver their plan by choosing concrete steps that they can act upon immediately. Building on this approach, success stories about women's businesses and social actions are included in newsletters and disseminated through the WORTH networks. These stories provide an ongoing source of energy that helps groups, NGOs, and WORTH staff overcome obstacles and turn problems into learning opportunities.

Participatory monitoring and support

WORTH monitoring occurs through three mechanisms: women periodically assess the health of their own economic group; women visit each other's groups to facilitate learning from one another; and staff visit groups to backstop, troubleshoot, and assist in identifying challenges the women are facing. In their groups, women use the "Road to Wealth" charts to assess the financial and social health of their group and identify opportunities for improvement. Groups also arrange exchange visits in which they attend a neighboring group's meeting and together analyze what is "the best" about the group's progress and what could be "even better." In addition local NGOs, through the Empowerment Workers, visit the groups on a biweekly basis and act as a conduit for the group's self-assessments to the NGOs and donors.

Sustainability and reaching scale

WORTH has become widely known as a program for the economic empowerment of women, yet it also has a proven track record in building the capacity of implementing grassroots organizations and NGOs. "Experiential learning," "action-oriented learning," "learning by doing," "hands-on learning"—all of these ideas capture the essence of what education experts and nonformal learning specialists have long recognized and acknowledged: that people learn best when theory and abstractions can become concrete learning activities and experience. Through WORTH small, often fledgling, local organizations learn, with Pact's support, how to plan a program, implement it, manage a budget, and report on it to Pact and donors. Implementing the program through local partners ensures WORTH's sustainability and capacity to reach scale.

How WORTH differs from other microfinance models

WORTH is an innovative, sustainable and low-cost program of women helping women that fosters grassroots development, increased family income, and local control of resources.

WORTH is based on the premise that dependency is not empowering. Unlike many other development programs that provide participants with capital and a variety of inputs needed for program delivery, WORTH provides no seed money, no matching grants, no subsidized interest rates, and no classroom teachers. Women learn that if they want a brighter future, they must take responsibility for their own development.

WORTH addresses the key components of the greatest development challenge of our time—HIV/AIDS. Two of the fundamental reasons HIV continues to plague sub-Saharan communities are gender inequality and general impoverishment. Through raising their incomes and gaining respect in their families and communities, women are better able to protect themselves from the social factors that leave women the most-at-risk group for disease transmission.

WORTH works through local NGOs and women's groups. WORTH quickly reaches thousands of villages because it works through women's groups and local NGOs that are often already active in their communities.

Savings-led microfinance links to, but does not depend on, outside credit. Most of the world's microfinance programs for women start by providing credit. WORTH starts with literacy, numeracy, and savings. With basic math and simple accounting skills women are able to manage a village bank (with their own savings constituting the loan capital) and become successful entrepreneurs.

Networking facilitates sharing knowledge and building bonds. Regular training workshops bring women together in groups of 20-25 from clusters of 10-15 groups, providing an important forum for problem solving, sharing, and interaction. The ties formed sustain the individual groups and create dynamic networks for social action.

Women focus on success. WORTH women look at their successes, their strengths, and their remarkable capacities to cope with adversity. Other programs focus on women's problems and the obstacles they must overcome. 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 is replicated by women themselves. Pact has found that women not in WORTH groups commonly ask WORTH women to teach them about WORTH village banking. In Nepal, program evaluators found that more than 800 groups had been created by WORTH women without any encouragement or support from Pact.