Tag: Uganda

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

The End of Hunger — Essays by Leaders

The Anthology, The End of Hunger:  Renewed Hope for Feeding the World  (2019, Illinois:  InterVarsity Press), includes 29 short, readable chapters about the problem of hunger, early childhood nutrition needs, and recommendations for the future, with vignettes included of Nepal, Uganda, Malawi  and Mexico.  Many of the chapters draw on Biblical references, reflective of the faith based backgrounds of many the book’s authors.  The book also includes a helpful glossary of terms  and links to the websites of relevant non-profits.

Among the several dozen authors, former Congressman Tony Hall recalls visiting famine camps in Ethiopia in 1984, which changed his life, career and goals.  He recounts his 21 day fast in the early 1990s when the Congressional Select Committee on Hunger was de-funded.  He was surprised at all the people influenced by his fast, which also led to the creation of the Congressional Hunger Center, the nonprofit which operates today.

Former Direct of of the World Food Programme, David Beasely, writes how hunger in the world is closely associated with conflict:  “Conflict drives ten out of the thirteen largest hunger crises in the world.  Sixty percent of the world’s hungry live in conflict zones.”

Roger Thurow writes how “the effects of malnutrition and stunting steamroll through the generations in an accumulation of historical insults:  stunted girls grow up to be stunted women, who give birth to underweight babies who themselves are stunted.  And the vicious cycle grinds on.  The ripples from stunting then engulf the community at large.”

Kimberly Flowers of CSIS notes that “Life-saving humanitarian efforts are often the first step in responding to fragile countries that don’t have the kind of stability needed for investments in long-term agricultural growth.”

Countering the gloom, Will Moore of the Eleanor Crook Foundation writes of the incredible progress achieved in reducing the numbers of annual child deaths between 1960 and today.  “Thanks to improvements in housing, sanitation and water quality, the advent of scientific medicine, the development of low-cost vaccines, and huge leaps in agricultural productivity and nutrition, the survival of your child today is no longer a coin flip…. Unfortunately, our media is infatuated with reporting only the many events where things go wrong and does not shed light on the broader, steady upward trend in global development, human health and living conditions.” 

Kimberly Williams-Paisley writes about providing food and dignity and remembers how she “loved Meals on Wheels because it was a great way to get to know the people I was serving.”

Former CARE CEO Helene Gayle writes about partnerships and gives examples about agricultural improvements.  She cites “programs such as the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa… which is funded through a partnership between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Gates Foundation.”

Pastor David Beckmann writes that “the binding constraint on progresss against hunger is the lack of sufficient political will.”  He explains how the nonprofit Bread for the World mobilizes 2.5 million volunteers and five thousand churches who have helped sensitize Congress to supporting nutrition programs.  Diane Black talks about the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s approach to conferring skills to people to feed themselves.

Former U.S. Senate Majority Leader William Frist recounts how “our remarkable scientists got to work and developed powerful life-saving anti-retroviral drugs.  In Africa, infected teachers and workers regained their health to build stronger and more secure communities.  In Botswana, for instance, life expectancy jumped from thirty-nine years to sixty-seven.”

Editor of this volume, Jenny Eaton Dyer, summarizes that “we are halfway to defeating extreme povery and disease worldwide.”  She explains the recent emphasis on addressing nutrition during any child’s first 1,000 days of life.  She concludes that “we need to reconsider nutrition, its importance in the Sustainable Development Goals, its critical role in addressing global health and development and the amount of funding we as a nation are willing to spend to end hunger and malnutriton worldwide.”