Giving Compass' Take:

• Village Enterprise is a small NGO that provides cash and business training/mentoring to impoverished communities living in rural Kenya and Uganda through sustainable anti-poverty approaches backed by data.

• Village Enterprise utilizes a graduation program approach, that is a proven cost-effective and sustainable method of addressing poverty. How can other philanthropists and NGOs use the same process when fighting poverty? 

• Check out the Center for Effective Philanthropy Magazine that features articles on effective giving for donors. 

Village Enterprise is a small NGO. Its annual budget? About $3.5m. The number of employees? Fewer than 150, with all but seven based in East Africa.

Yet Village Enterprise is about to test a big idea that has the potential to ensure that money spent to fight global poverty has real impact. It’s known, inelegantly, as results-based financing.

Based in San Carlos, CA, Village Enterprise has been around since the late 1980s. For most of its history, the organization was run primarily by volunteers, working with individual donors and churches in the US to make cash grants to the poor in Africa.

Today, the NGO provides cash, business training and mentoring to extremely poor people in rural Kenya and Uganda to help them start small businesses and join savings groups. Typically, they raise livestock, farm, keep bees or open a small store. It’s one of a number of NGOs, both large (BRAC) and small (TrickleUp), that practice what’s known as the graduation program, an anti-poverty program that has been found to be cost-effective and sustainable by randomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving more than 10,000 people in Africa, Asia and Latin America, as Science magazine reported in 2015.

Read the full article about poverty solutions by Marc Gunther from Nonprofit Chronicles