The Business Savings Program is a key component of Village Enterprise’s microenterprise development program targeting the rural poor. Village Enterprise empowers its business owners by giving them the tools to start successful and sustainable businesses so that they can generate income and become self-sufficient. The four aspects of our program are, business and financial literacy training, seed capital, mentoring, and savings circles. The Business Savings Program helps business owners form self-directed Business Savings Groups (BSGs) known commonly in the industry as Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLAs). These groups teach business owners the habit of saving on a monthly basis.

Savings are a powerful means to not only maintain their current businesses, but also to diversify into new businesses or recover from setbacks such as unsuccessful harvests, theft, a medical emergency, or even a failed venture. The structure of the BSG is created during the first months of the program and participants continue to receive savings training and on-going mentoring throughout the year. After the completion of the program the BSGs continue to function, thus serving as Village Enterprise’s exit strategy.

Village Enterprise trains and empowers people living in extreme poverty to increase their savings and create sustainable incomes. In turn, this income will enable business owners to invest in education, health and nutrition, housing, and their small business. Over the long term, investments in these key areas will result in significant additional economic and social benefits. Savings is a key part of a business owner’s long-term success.

Caroline Bernadi
Foundation Director

The post Save money. Live better. appeared first on Village Enterprise.

This new assessment is enabling us to see the details of our program across Kenya and Uganda. In the presentation that is given at the end of each month, we are able to give feedback to each Business Mentor on how well the Village Enterprise program is being implemented in his or her respective region.

The information is so helpful that we have added new surveys to further monitor aspects of our program in the field. We will now evaluate how business owners are adopting their new knowledge, the effectiveness of Business Savings Group (BSG) meetings, and the training sessions held by Business Mentors. The first addition will help us see if business owners are gaining knowledge from the business and financial trainings that we provide and applying that knowledge to their everyday business activities. The team has identified two questions per module that will be added to the current spot-check form. These questions are intended to find out if business owners are adopting and practicing the knowledge received from trainings rather than simply memorizing information. The latter two additions are new spot-check forms that will specifically look at training sessions and BSG meetings. These spot-checks will be done at their respective meetings unlike the regular spot-check form, which takes place at the place of business or where the business owners reside.

These new additions will further improve Village Enterprise’s monitoring and evaluation efforts. The spot-checks will also strength our mentoring program. Mentoring of business owners is regularly done by Business Mentors, but because of the spot-check process, Field Coordinators and office staff members are engaging in conversation on a regular basis with Business Owners, further guiding them in their business activities. A few weeks ago I was visiting a business owner that is raising livestock. The Business Mentor had advised the business owner to build a structure for her livestock. During my visit, I was able to see the progress of the structure and remind the business owner of the importance of the structure for the success of her business. The spot-check provides an opportunity to reinforce the different topics Business Mentors have been teaching the business owners and helps ensure their future success.

Sisay Ashenafi
Fellow, Peace Corp Volunteer

The post Spot-Checking to Improve Our Program appeared first on Village Enterprise.

First I visited businesses near the Kisere forest that are just starting our program. The poverty in the region is painfully real. Emma is a widow with a debilitating eye condition who supports ten dependents. A few weeks ago, after three months of business and financial literacy training, Emma and the other members of the Vision Business Group received their grant to buy and sell fish, groundnuts, and fruit. Their business is just starting, but Emma is already full of hope for the future. She told me that the grant has uplifted her but that right now she’s still unsure how she’ll feed her children each day. At the end of our time together, she handed me the four bananas left from the day’s sales to express her gratitude.

It was hard to walk away not knowing what would happen to Emma. The next few days, however, were an opportunity to see Emma’s future through visits to other Village Enterprise business owners such as Harriet Nafula. Harriet used to start her day like Emma, knowing that breakfast for her eleven children would consist of tea without sugar and not knowing what else she might be able to feed them. Now, each day is no longer something for Harriet to dread.

As part of the Rahema Business Group, Harriet runs a kiosk in the center of Moi’s Bridge, Kenya. They sell groundnuts, millet, oranges, avocados, and sweet bananas. Harriet and her fellow business owners have worked hard and sacrificed in order to rent both the kiosk and a storage facility, enabling them to easily add fresh stock to their prime location. The kiosk earns each family about $4/day, putting them all well above the extreme poverty level. And they haven’t even graduated from our program yet!

Thanks to Village Enterprise, Harriet can now give her children breakfast and buy meat for dinner. She even sends shopping money to her son who is away at school! And her produce is fantastic—easily the best avocado I have ever tasted!

Understandably, many of us see poverty as if through a snow globe, a small and faraway world. Please know that with each shake we are covering the ground with a fresh layer of hope. Harriet sums it up best. She told me to please tell the donors of Village Enterprise “thank you for taking away my stress.” She thanks Village Enterprise “for making me who I am.” I will let her words speak for us both.

Leah Newman
Marketing Communications Director

The post Forecast for Africa: Hope With a Chance of Snow Flurries appeared first on Village Enterprise.

The livestock tagging process leverages the Business Savings Groups (BSGs), mobilizing them outside of their normal role as a community savings group. During the pilot three BSGs were included: Dongo Bino, Ooti Anyim, and Otie Kede Gen. These represented a total of 90 business owners. Interestingly, something that seemed to us so technical and difficult to do ended up to be a simple process and a great success! Initially we had planned to outsource expertise for the process. Instead, every staff member was able to tag at least one animal and this was the most exiting of all. I am proud to report the success of the whole process, having tagged a total of 87 heads of animals in just one and a half hours during the first day of tagging held in Katine! The next day in Katakwi we were even more efficient.

From the Business Mentors

Catherine Ameso said in her closing remarks that the tagging process is going to make her job as a mentor easier. She noted that the identification of animals is no longer going to be a problem and that she does not expect any business owner to present an animal without a Village Enterprise tag.

Esther Apolot in her address encouraged the business owners to take very good care of their animals in terms of treatment and spraying. She also reported during the bi-weekly meeting of the Business Mentors that she had a number of business owners coming from various villages where she had previously worked to visit her at her home. Their main reason for the visit was to ask why their animals were left out in the tagging process. To her, this signified an overwhelming number of people interested in the process.

From the Business Owners

Our business owners feel the tagging process acts as a security measure for their animals. Now they can easily identify them. No one will steal from them because everybody in the village will know that these animals belong to only individuals participating in Village Enterprise program.

One business owner stood up and expressed how exited he was to see all of their goats, sheep, and pigs bearing tags. He said “we have been seeing tagged animals in other places and they looked special and I wondered how I could ever get access to such special animals but here I am, it’s the first of its kind!”

Maurice Eriaku
Field Coordinator, Uganda

The post A Lively Livestock Tagging Pilot appeared first on Village Enterprise.

Working in extremely remote communities throughout Uganda and western Kenya, it’s obvious that there are very critical factors keeping people in extreme poverty. Lack of infrastructure, including roads and electricity grids, lack of access to land and food, and lack of healthcare systems are a common focus of the international donor community. We at Village Enterprise, however, discovered another critical factor that we’ve dedicated our resources to mitigating. That factor is access to information.

Our business owners have extremely limited access to knowledge and information that keeps them from accessing opportunities. Without access to new information and technologies, our business owners are trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty. They are forced to rely on traditional agricultural practices passed down through generations. After being sheltered from outside influences, they are extremely reluctant to take up new technologies and agricultural practices–ultimately limiting themselves to the success level of their family members before them.

The SMARTer Solution

Village Enterprise’s innovative solution is S.M.A.R.T. (Smarter Market Analysis Risk Tool), an extensive market analysis at the village level–focusing on capturing seasonal pricing, risk, demand, and price vulnerability of the various microenterprises available to our clientele. The results are a powerful risk/reward matrix that gives our clientele a competitive advantage and more certainty when making business decisions. Thus, giving rural African entrepreneurs a smarter tool for a smarter future!

S.M.A.R.T. and Our Program: What being SMART Looks Like

The best way to explain the tool is by putting it into context of the Village Enterprise program.

Village Enterprise starts businesses three times a year–February, June, and October. In the beginning of these months, our business mentors walk our business groups through an extensive business selection and planning process. Since the majority of businesses started by our entrepreneurs are agricultural (either crops and/or livestock), their products are not ready for market until after a minimum of three months. S.M.A.R.T. allows the group to use facts instead of hearsay when making this decision.

To create S.M.A.R.T., we collected price, risk, demand, and other information from the local village markets during the months in which our business owners would be selling their commodities (May/June for businesses starting in February, etc.). Enumerators collect this information using Android phones. By harnessing mobile technology for data collection, it eliminates the need for data entry and streamlines the analytical process.  This market information gets put through extensive calculations to produce the following price/risk/demand matrix:

Brief Synopsis: The x-axis is risk. The y-axis measures the profitability of the commodity. The size of the circle represents the demand for the commodity in the market. Farmers are directed to crops located in quadrant I since the crops are extremely profitable in their market with little assumed risk. Farmers should never select crops located in quadrant IV. When selecting between the crops remaining in quadrants II and III, farmers must consider other factors like experience in order to decide how much risk they are willing to take on.

Business Mentors use this matrix when guiding their groups through the business selection process by emphasizing the importance of looking at different factors besides profitability when choosing a business.

Last October, I observed this process being done in Kenya. With the guidance from the S.M.A.R.T. results, many business owners selected chicken rearing as all short-term crops (3 month maturation period) fell in quadrants III and IV in their local markets. Come February and March, these businesses reported great success from their chicken businesses and thanked the S.M.A.R.T. for helping them make the smart decision.

One major distinguishing factor between Village Enterprise’s S.M.A.R.T. and other market-to-farmer pricing communication tools being created by other NGO’s is the depth and breadth to which our S.M.A.R.T. operates. True to our mission, Village Enterprise targets a clientele underserved by 99% of NGOs. Most farmer-to-market price tools take price data from larger, more lucrative town centers and broadcast this information to farmers throughout the region. Even our closest business are located several kilometers away and do not have the means to transport themselves or their products to these towns. We collect market prices at a village-market level, the markets that our clientele can reliably access.

S.M.A.R.T. is already being recognized by the international community for its innovativeness and its ability to be used as a resource to alleviate poverty! Rockefeller Foundation recognized it as one of the top 100 Next Century Innovators!

Read more here: http://centennial.rockefellerfoundation.org/innovators/profile/giving-rural-african-entrepreneurs-a-smarter-tool-for-a-smarter-future

Ellen Metzger
Fellow

The post Leading the Way in Being S.M.A.R.T.: Introducing the Smarter Market Analysis Risk Tool! appeared first on Village Enterprise.

For the full article, please click here.

In East Africa, access to accurate, timely information is improving the livelihood of entrepreneurial farmers.

Jerry Kaplan—American serial entrepreneur, executive, technical innovator, and author—says the five biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs make are having unclear goals and an unclear mission, trying to prove that they are smart, becoming greedy, hiring people they like (rather than people they need), and not knowing when to let go. I agree! But I would add one more. I live in an environment where lack of information is a driver of entrepreneurial failure. And good information can drive success.

I work for Village Enterprise, a nonprofit microenterprise development organization in East Africa. Village Enterprise is like an angel investor for entrepreneurs living in extreme poverty. Because we provide grants rather than loans, we do not receive a financial return, but we do fund more than 2,000 new businesses a year and provide training and mentoring to over 6,000 entrepreneurs during one-year periods.

As you can imagine, the profile of our entrepreneurs is dramatically different from those in the United States. Our business owners are completely committed to their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to start a business. As a result, they are also extremely risk-averse. Not earning an income affects very important life factors: you cannot take your children to the doctor, pay their school fees, or feed your family. Therefore, the choice of business is tremendously influenced by fear of failure. Until recently, Village Enterprise’s business owners relied on past experiences and anecdotal decision-making processes to launch their businesses. The majority of these businesses are agriculture-related. I’ll give you three examples.

To continue reading, please click here.

Konstantin Zvereff
Senior Director of Programs and Operations

The post Konstantin Zvereff explains why information is a cash crop on the SSIR blog appeared first on Village Enterprise.

When I was in the field last year, interviewing our clients about how their lives have changed as a result of our program, I saw the dramatic effect of improved self-confidence in the lives of these courageous people. As Dean Karlan notes, seeing a pathway out of poverty is an important factor in leaving the poverty trap. Recently, our business mentor Stella Ikiring shared this story of a group she’s working with—the Alakara Business group, in Uganda. I want to share it with you.

Ketty Agwang, Christine Alungat, and Georgina Aguti had ambitions to start their own business before they joined Village Enterprise. However, they knew that finding someone to lend them money for seed capital would be impossible and they lost hope of improving their lives. They struggled to pay school fees and their children went to school in tattered uniforms. Their lives were hard and seemed they would forever stay that way.

When the three women heard what they could do through the Village Enterprise program, it seemed like a miracle. They finally had a way of changing their lives. They received their seed capital (grant #24206) and started their own business with five pigs under the name Alakara Business Group. With the help of their Business Mentor Stella Ikiring, the women have seen their business flourish. They are currently working with their Business Savings Group to purchase a cow, and they are excited about the new opportunities this expansion will bring. They have embraced a habit of saving, which has helped plan for the future. They also have the comfort of knowing they can go to their Business Savings Group to borrow money if they ever run into financial trouble.

The group says Village Enterprise provided the encouragement they needed to work hard to sustain their families and improve their lives. The three have become a unified group through their time spent working together and attending Savings Group meetings. They value these meetings as a way to share business ideas and also resolve any conflicts among themselves. Ketty, Christine, and Georgina are so grateful for the opportunity to realize their dream of being business owners. Their families now have hope. Their basic needs can be met and their children have hope of breaking out of the cycle of cycle poverty.

Jennifer Nixon
Senior Director of Development

The post Happiness and Hope Can Help appeared first on Village Enterprise.

The group then draws a map of the village and makes a list (usually using a village roster) of every household in the village.  Then, the group creates a list of community-determined characteristics of what a rich person is, a moderate person is, a poor person is, and a very-poor person is.  Characteristics may include: how much livestock a person has (a rich person may have 5 goats, whereas a poor person may have 3 chickens), if (s)he can afford school fees, if his/her children are enrolled in school, if the family has a grass thatched roofs, if the family has concrete floors or dirt floors, etc etc.

Once they have determined the list of characteristics, the group places each household in the village into one of the 4 categories. Because Village Enterprise works with individuals living in extreme poverty – we work with the households who are characterized, by their community, as being “very poor”. Following the PWR, Village Enterprise uses a second targeting survey to determine whether or not an individual meets the requirements of our program. Those individuals that qualify after completing both targeting tools are offered a place in our program.
The targeting process not only ensures that we are truly reaching those living in extreme poverty but that the community is part of the process of choosing our program participants.

Amalia Frank
Fellow

The post Participatory Wealth Ranking – The Difference Between “Poor” and “Very Poor” appeared first on Village Enterprise.

In 2009, the proportion of people in Sub Saharan Africa living on less than $1.25 a day was just below 50 percent – the highest of any region in the world. For an individual lacking a formal education and living in a rural area in Africa with little infrastructure to provide access to outside employment, starting a small business is the best way to earn a living. Yet, according to the humanitarian organization Care, less than 10 percent of the more than 300 million economically active individuals in Sub Saharan Africa have access to formal financial services.

Starting a business requires a small loan or grant that traditional banks typically do not provide to people living in extreme poverty. The reasons vary, but banks point to the fact that the poor lack collateral, savings, and are too far from their offices.

Aid for Africa members are helping the poorest of the poor in Sub Saharan Africa, particularly women, start their own businesses through a variety of microfinance initiatives, which include small loans, grants, and savings instruments. For women, often the main providers of food, health care and education for their families, these services are critical.

The BOMA Project, which works in Northern Kenya, provides start-up grants of $150 to small business groups made up of three women each who typically own kiosks selling food and basic household supplies. The key to the program is BOMA’s work with local village mentors – community leaders and role models who already have professional experience. For two years, mentors help the groups write business plans and learn record-keeping, marketing, and other valuable skills.

BOMA’s model was designed by staff at Village Enterprise, another Aid for Africa member. Since 1987, Village Enterprise has helped create 23,000 small businesses. Village Enterprise estimates that every new business created through its grant and mentoring program is associated with about 18 additional meals a day, five more children attending school, and an increase in the value of livestock of about $500.

Whether it is a widow who needs to expand her second-hand clothing business or a woman who wants to buy a goat for milk production, Aid for Africa’s members are providing Africa’s poorest with the tools to succeed as entrepreneurs.

To learn more please visit www.aidforafrica.org

Brett Gerstein
Aid for Africa

The post Guest Blog Spot, Aid for Africa: Helping the Poorest of the Poor in Sub Saharan Africa appeared first on Village Enterprise.

See “Chimpanzee” the week it opens, April 20-26. For that one week only, Disneynature will contribute 20 cents per ticket to JGI to protect wild chimpanzees.*

The Earth Day weekend release of Disneynature’s movie Chimpanzee is an occasion to celebrate the work of many conservationists, foundations, and donors involved in supporting chimpanzees, their habitats, and the people who live near them.

In particular, Village Enterprise would like to thank the staff of The Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) for their efforts to make our world a more sustainable, healthy place for all animals –  including the human community – and to take this opportunity to congratulate JGI on its 35^th anniversary.

In late 2007, in partnership with JGI, Village Enterprise created an integrated microenterprise and conservation program for the rural poor who live in communities adjacent to the Budongo Forest Reserve in western Uganda – home to roughly 600-800 chimpanzees.

Village Enterprise’s Budongo Program, a grant recipient of Disney Worldwide Conservation Fund, is highlighted in the teacher’s guide to the Chimpanzee film as an example of a program that balances conservation and poverty needs.

To date, Village Enterprise has launched over 800 micro-businesses in 40 villages, trained 4,000 people in business skills and conservation principles (over 50% women), added agricultural/livestock training and a livestock vaccine program, and co-hosted a field day for the first PCLG international conference on Linking Great Ape Conservation-Poverty Alleviation.

As our lead conservation partner, JGI-Uganda staff provides strategic direction, conservation training materials, and illegal activity measurement and evaluation. They and their colleagues in the USA and Tanzania offices have also coached Village Enterprise staff on conservation issues and have provided recommendations to key foundations.

Thank you to JGI and to all of you who support the innovative partnerships of development and conservation. Go see Chimpanzee and celebrate Earth Day!

For more information about See “Chimpanzee,” Save Chimpanzees please visit the JGI website.

Susan Young
Conservation Project Manager

*For everyone who sees Disneynature CHIMPANZEE during opening week (April 20-April 26, 2012), Disneynature will contribute $.20 per ticket to the Jane Goodall Institute for the Disneynature Tchimpounga Nature Reserve Project with a minimum of $100,000 pledged to this program.

The post Primates and Poverty Alleviation appeared first on Village Enterprise.