The Story behind WORTH
History WORTH Model Appreciative Planning and Action WORTH and HIV/AIDS The mission of Pact's WORTH program is to give poor women in communities around the world the opportunity to discover their inherent power to change their lives by using new tools and training to develop successful microenterprise ventures — including managing village banks — as well as skills in reading, writing and basic financial literacy. In their hearts women have a vision of how their stories could be different...where there is income enough to feed their families...HIV/AIDS and other diseases do not take away their husbands and children...and their daughters have access to education and promising futures.
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.
HistoryWORTH builds on Pact's award-winning women's empowerment project in Nepal funded by USAID. The project, which was implemented between 1998 and 2001, demonstrated that large numbers of poor women have the capacity to quickly move themselves from being illiterate to being literate, income producing, and socially active members of their communities. In three short years:
The model for WORTH was first piloted in Nepal under a four-year, USAID-funded grant entitled the Women's Empowerment Program (WEP), which ran from 1998 to September 2001. A second phase of WEP was funded by the World Bank Development Marketplace. This grant went directly to a newly localized Pact organization, Samjauta Nepal.
WORTH Model
How WORTH worksWORTH 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—
 Small group formation 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 studyThe 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. 
MicroenterprisesWhen 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 approachLooking 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 supportWORTH 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 scaleWORTH 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 modelsWORTH 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.
Appreciative Planning and ActionAppreciative Planning and Action (APA) is a capacity building approach that builds on strengths and assets and identifies collective hopes and dreams to create an empowering vision of the future that leads to action for organizations, groups and communities. Through the APA approach, 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. For more information on Appreciative Inquiry and Appreciative Action and Planning, please see the Appreciative Inquiry Commons: http://appreciativeinquiry.cwru.edu/
WORTH and HIV/AIDSIt is recognized that many of the problems AIDS-affected children and households face result either directly or indirectly from the economic impact of AIDS. For this reason part of an effective and strategic response to the HIV virus includes programs that show strong potential for producing economic resilience among poor households in a cost-effective, sustainable manner. WORTH fosters grassroots development, increases family income, and develops local control of resources through community controlled village banks. The increased income of caregivers and local groups enables improved care and support for orphaned and vulnerable children. While the extended family system is the central social welfare mechanism in sub-Saharan African society, HIV/AIDS has placed considerable strain on communities' ability to care for children orphaned and affected by this crippling disease. Poverty levels have increased in all communities affected by HIV. Since women are more likely than men to take responsibility for orphans, the economic burden placed on female caregivers is especially great. For example, in Zambia the average income of female-headed households is only half of that of male-headed households with orphans. In both Kenya and Tanzania the number of children living in female-headed households over the past decade has dramatically increased, with over two-thirds of such households in some districts of Tanzania living on less than $1 a day. In a Ugandan study, at least one in four widows reported losing her property when her partner died, which forced her to work in unsustainable and often risky environments in order to support remaining household members. As impoverished households become more isolated, it is crucial to strengthen the capacity of those providing care to orphans and other vulnerable children to support themselves and the children in their care through women-focused and community-driven economic empowerment initiatives. Through WORTH, communities strengthen economic coping capacities to provide comprehensive, compassionate care for the most vulnerable in their society. By directly increasing self-esteem and the income of caregivers/heads of households, the entire community benefits and children receive education, basic health care, and nutrition needed for their well-being. WORTH fosters networking among women and local groups that empowers and ignites communities to take control of HIV/AIDS-related challenges and find solutions. Monthly training workshops provide an important forum for problem solving, sharing, and interaction. These ties sustain the individual groups and create dynamic networks for social action including learning about available HIV/AIDS resources, identifying methods and resources to care for the most vulnerable in their communities and acting to reduce stigma. Read more about the WORTH program: WORTH
|
Given literacy, and income they can count on and group support, women come to see themselves differently. When the vision of each woman is pooled with the vision of others, the group generates energy which serves to forge real change in their lives and in the lives of their families and communities. 