Tag: cash

Village Enterprise, a Nonprofit, Champions the “Graduation Model” to End Poverty

May 8, 2026    In the mid 2000s, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) pioneered a new approach for helping the very poor to grow out of poverty phase by phase, an approach called the “Graduation Approach.”  Replicated since then by many NGOs, the period of implementation tends to be about two years for each family, and averages about $500 per household with researchers estimating $2-5 in benefits for each dollar spent.

One NGO championing this approach is Village Enterprise which combats hunger and builds resilience.  In 2025, Village Enterprise reached over 316,000 people in rural Africa, bringing their cumulative total to more than 2.3 million lives  affected, including over 1 million in Uganda alone.

Prior to her stepping down as CEO this year, Hunger Notes had interviewed  Diane Calvi, who led the California-based nonprofit from 2010 to 2026,  transforming it into a multi-country leader in evidence-based poverty graduation.  From her interview:

     “Village Enterprise is exclusively working with people living in extreme poverty in rural areas of Africa. We go into villages and introduce ourselves to the local community. All of the staff that implement the program are recruited from the local communities:  they speak the local language, they understand the culture. And they introduce the program, which entails targeting the poorest of the poor.”

     “I don’t even consider the Graduation Model we implement a livelihood model. I consider it a microentrepreneurship model. We’re really helping people become entrepreneurs for the first time — but not through a microfinance model. We’re doing that through a cash transfer, which gives the poor a lot of agency. It’s not like so many livelihood programs: here are some goats, here are some chickens. You’re giving them cash and saying: write a business plan, figure out how you’re going to run your business.”

      “Because we provide the cash in the form of a grant rather than a loan, people aren’t so busy trying to pay back the loan. They’re able to invest in their families, they’re able to invest in the business. And so we see better impacts — both in terms of increasing income, savings, and nutrition….We’ve been rolling out a program called DreamSave, which is a digital bookkeeping application at the savings group level that runs on a smartphone. That’s been really well received and has had some positive impacts on the actual savings of the savings groups.”

     “The cash transfer is provided to them on a mobile phone.”

    “For every dollar you invest in the program, the participants generate … $5 in lifetime income.  At baseline, the households were on average eating 1.7 meals a day. Five years later, on average, they were eating 2.5 meals. In terms of animal protein, they went from eating animal protein every other week to eating animal protein 1.3 times a week. So also pretty significant increases in protein consumption.”

    “We need to have results-based funding frameworks. There need to be incentives for the achievement of results. The kind of receipt-based, activity-based funding is not incentivizing achievement. There really aren’t the incentives in place.”

     “When I started with Village Enterprise in 2010, it was a very small organization with a $1 million budget and about 18 staff. And of the 18 staff, 8 of them were in Africa and 10 of them were in the U.S.,  it was mostly run through volunteers in the field.   We have primarily been in the rural areas of Kenya and Uganda. We’re now about 530 staff people, and we’re working in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Ethiopia.  We launched that project during one of the worst droughts in the history of East Africa. So it was really timely, the implementation of the project. And it has shown to be successful despite the challenges of working during a very severe drought — which I think is very encouraging.”

    “We work both in northern Uganda outside the refugee settlements and in the refugee settlements. In the refugee settlement, yes, most of them are Sudanese refugees — 80 to 90% are from South Sudan.”  [End of interview]

A notable evolution of the programming is to embed the graduation model within African government systems. Village Enterprise provided technical assistance to the Government of Kenya throughout the development of the country’s first Ultra-Poor Graduation Strategy, and began providing technical assistance to Nigeria’s Kaduna State Government (with Gates Foundation funding) to support 1,200 women and young people to launch small businesses. A £7 million project funded by the British High Commission — “Kuza Jamii II” benefits 90,000 people across five arid and semi-arid counties in Kenya and the Dadaab refugee settlements, running through March 2026.

More recently, Village Enterprise launched SPRINT (Scaling Poverty Reduction through Innovation and New Technologies), a digitally enhanced version of the graduation model using tools like Kolibri for training, WhatsApp for mentoring, and DreamSave to track savings, enabling product scaling officers to support 5 to 10 times more entrepreneurs than traditional business mentors. The goal is to reach 15,000 entrepreneurs by mid-2026, with potential rollout in Rwanda and Ethiopia.

Update:  Replacing Ms. Calvi, Sazini Mojapelo was appointed as the new CEO, becoming Village Enterprise’s first Africa-based CEO, beginning February 17, 2026

Book Classic: Famine, Conflict and Response by Fred Cuny

Book Classic:  Famine, Conflict and Response:  a Basic Guide

By Fred Cuny, with Rick Hill      (West Hartford, CN:  Kumarian Press       1999)

This basic, extremely readable text about famine prevention and relief remains a preferred textbook decades after first written by Fred Cuny, and published after he was killed along with his team near Chechnya.  Compiled posthumously by Fred’s colleagues Rick Hill and Pat Reed, the text style is not academic, but practical, reflecting Fred’s own frontline problem solving in a wide range of emergencies.

Chapter one addresses the causes of famine, including war, drought, disruptions to markets, failure to plant, collapse in purchasing power and environmental degradation.  This is followed by an examination of the consequences of famine, including measles, diarrhea, the separation of family members, and challenges to social bonds.  In chapter three, Cuny puts forward the notion famines spread geographically, how famine ‘belts’ shift.  Chapter four explores the economy of rural subsistence communities and herding pastoralists.  He observes how famine coping strategies, such as eating seed stocks, prolong the famine by decreasing the next year’s harvest.

Chapter five shifts to aid agency response, namely early warning, including the USAID Famine Early Warning System (FEWS) which watches for indicators of famine;  increases in distress sales, livestock deaths, crop failure, poor rainfall, low food reserves, and then – at a late stage – increases in the rate of child malnutrition.  Fred pointed out the value of “food demand models” that “attempt to find out whether people have reasonable access to that food..  Access is measured by the market price and whether people have the money to buy an item or barter for it.”  Notably:  “a rapid increase in food prices or a drop in family income may indicate the onset of famine.”

The book then has several chapters of “counter-famine” interventions, including food, cash, “market interventions” including loans, market sales, food-for-work, price supports for livestock, barter, grain-for animal exchanges, subsidies, price controls, and income-generating projects that improve agricultural systems.  Page 76 presents a novel and brilliant diagram matching stages of famine (hoarding, migration, starvation, etc.) against preferred interventions (monetization, food-for-work, price support, intensive feeding, etc.)  Fred encourages counter-famine operations “aimed at keeping the local market system from collapsing, preventing people from having to sell their assets, stopping migration and maintaining the family.”

Decades ahead of his time, Cuny outlined the use of vouchers or coupons, to be redeemed with identified food vendors set up for each community.  He also recognized the counter-famine dynamics of tapping local merchants and food supplies:  “Once merchants release food they are hoarding, others will also start to sell… helping to reactive the normal market system.”

The book explains food rations and the logistics of moving and storing food to camps.  His explanation of the use of aircraft is short but clear.  The book concludes with chapters about effective aid monitoring and cross-border operations which are frequently necessary for reaching conflict zones.  The book concludes with discussion of helping populations along border “enclaves” and their long-term shift to rehabilitation and return.

In the volume’s introduction former OXFAM, CEO John Hammock, and former USAID administrator, Andrew Natsios, explain that Fred’s “powers of observation and analysis were his greatest strengths, allowing him to aggregate disparate and seemingly unrelated data into a coherent explanation of what was happening and then design a comprehensive strategy to address the crisis.” Then, “Whenever Fred traveled to a food emergency, he would first stop at the local market to review prices for price and livestock and to talk with merchants about inflationary pressures, the volume of commodity turnover in the market, the sources of commodity supply, and to which local ethnic or political groups the merchants were allied.  And then he would simply stand and observe:  who was buying, what they were buying, and what they were using for currency.  By the end of the first day, he would understand much of the economy of famine in the region.”

They also summarize key themes that ran through Fred’s analyses:

  •  The context of the emergency is crucial;
  •   Traditional responses by international agencies can cause more harm than good;
  •   International aid is a drop in the bucket compared with local aid;
  •   The key to success in relief aid is involving local people directly;
  •   Relief and development are intricately linked;
  •   Relief aid is not a logistical exercise to get goods to people – it is a process to accelerate recovery; and
  •   Relief intervention teaches us lessons; we should heed the lessons learned from the past.