WORTH is a women’s empowerment program that combines business, banking and literacy -- a program built on an APA foundation in which women become social activists and social entrepreneurs, effective leaders who are bringing about change in their community. Initially known as the Women’s Empowerment Program (WEP), Pact conducted the WORTH program in Nepal for 2 ½ years between 1999 and 2001, reaching 125,000 women in 6,000 economic groups across Nepal’s southern Terai. In WORTH, approximately 1,500 of these groups, with 35,000 members, received training to become informal-sector village banks (VBs). All training, training of trainers, workshops, and materials were woven around the basic Appreciative Planning and Action framework, encouraging local NGOs, Village Banks, and the women themselves to focus on their successes, envisioning 'even better,' and making action plans and personal commitments to achieve their dreams for their children and grandchildren. A Maoist insurgency plunged Nepal increasingly into civil war after 2001, when all program support from Pact ended and WORTH groups, including village banks, were entirely on their own.
In 2006, as Pact contemplated launching a new Social Franchising approach for WORTH delivery and the Maoist insurgency was beginning to subside in Nepal, Pact asked Linda Mayoux, a women’s empowerment specialist based in Cambridge, England, to head up a research effort with the Valley Research Group in Kathmandu. The research would determine if any of these 1,500 village banks still existed, despite the civil war and the collapse of national governance, and, if so, how they may be operating today as community banks and as vehicles of change in villages. The study would also explore WORTH’s impact on women’s capacity to create wealth, to generate new incomes by replicating WORTH as social entrepreneurs, and to tackle broader issues such as domestic abuse, community development and the ability of women and their banks to weather the Maoist insurgency itself.
The research methodology required finding at least 272 village banks from a random sample of 450 in 7 of the 21 districts in which Pact had implemented the program in order to offer a 95% confidence level and a margin of error of 5%. To achieve this level of reliability and validity, seven Nepali research teams, in four-wheel-drive vehicles, rickshaws, ‘tempos’ and on foot, fanned out across the 500-mile-wide Terai of southern Nepal to find the data upon which this report is built. Their search uncovered 288 thriving village banks, plus another 42 banks they had started on their own. In-depth interviews included members and management committees, women who over the years have left their village banks, members of dissolved groups, and a comparison group of poor non-WORTH women in village bank communities.
Five overarching findings are seminal:
Wealth creation
A village bank today holds average total assets of over NRs. 211,000, or $3,200; this is more than three times their holdings in 2001. A WORTH woman, who in 1999 may well have wondered where she would find her mandatory savings of NRs 10 ($.15) each week, now has an average equity stake of $116 in her village bank.
Sustainability
Approximately two-thirds (64%) of the original 1,536 village banks – nearly 1,000 (983) groups with approximately 25,000 members – are still active 8 ½ years after program initiation and 5-6 years after all WORTH-related support ended. Replication
25% of the existing WORTH groups, with neither external assistance nor prompting from WORTH, have helped start an estimated 425 new groups involving another 11,000 women. If all of these groups – and the original WORTH groups – are currently operating, there may be more village bankers conducting business today in Nepal than there were when WORTH formal programming ended in 2001. Without knowing about Pact’s social franchising ideas for making WORTH a revenue generating opportunity for women, the women in Nepal are already in the business of making WORTH a business. The next step is to get paid for doing just that.
Literacy Women highly value WORTH’s focus on literacy and their new capacity to education their children:
97% of respondents reporting that literacy is ‘very important’ to their lives.
83% percent of women report that because of WORTH they are able to send more of their children to school.
Domestic disputes and violence
Two-thirds (66%) of groups report that members bring their personal or family problems to the group for advice or help. Of these, three-quarters (77%) of the groups report helping members deal with issues of domestic disputes and related problems. Forty-three percent of women report that their degree of freedom from domestic violence has changed because of their membership in a WORTH group. One in ten reports that WORTH has actually helped ‘change their life’ because of its impact on domestic violence.
Additional significant findings include:
The overwhelming majority of women report they are obtaining increased access to health services for their families because of WORTH
Two-thirds of groups are engaged in community action and 3/4ths report that their group has done something to help others in their community
Half of the groups report having been active in efforts to reduce discrimination in their communities in support of women and girls
Village banks have created and maintained relationships and networks, providing informal technical assistance to each other with no external assistance
Women’s self-confidence has significantly increased; the vast majority of village bank management committee members report that their lives have changed as they have become leaders in their families and communities
Almost half of the women interviewed report that WORTH increased their ability to cope with the Maoist crisis and the crumbling of government services.
Together these findings suggest that today in Nepal there are almost 1,000 active village banks formed through WORTH itself—and potentially more than 400 replicated banks—providing banking products and services to well over 30,000 women. The members of these groups, who own and manage their banks, have been able to increase their financial assets substantially while being active in their communities to bring about development and social transformation. The finding that almost half of the women interviewed, report that WORTH has increased their ability to cope with the Maoist crisis and the crumbling of government services has obvious implications for the value of the program in areas plagued by civil strife.
All in all, this research demonstrates that WORTH has proved remarkably robust and resilient in the hands of poor women who for almost a decade, in the face of daunting obstacles, have proven their ability as catalysts for positive change. Yet, for all this documented success, both WORTH and the entire field of savings-led microfinance, while together reaching some 2 million of the world’s poorest, remain one of the best kept secrets in the world of international development and poverty alleviation. Together, almost unnoticed by the $20 billion credit-led microfinance industry, the empowered women followed in this research study – like other WORTH women now found elsewhere in Asia and Africa – have proven themselves to be uniquely equipped to lead a new generation of social entrepreneurs to take WORTH to other women across Nepal, and beyond, through a dynamic model of social franchising being piloted by WORTH that is potentially as creative and ground-breaking as the original WORTH model. These women have the resources, know-how, and motivation to turn WORTH into a business venture, helping each other generate a new source of income for themselves, training and supporting other women to join them as social entrepreneurs to create an international movement to bootstrap themselves, their families, and their communities out of poverty.