A Must Watch Presentation on Empowerment and Savings Based Micro-Finance

In this 1 hour presentation, Marcia Odell from PACT speaks passionately about the failure of traditional models of international development to end poverty.

Odell is the director of a successful savings-based micro-finance program called WORTH. Although the focus of her presentation is poverty reduction and literacy in developing countries, her conclusions are applicable to most forms of grant-making.

Presentations like this one remind us that micro-philanthropy and traditional philanthropy should be about identifying what works and doing more of it. If every platform for peer-to-peer social action was built around this simple notion, then we would have no shortage of success stories about using social media for social change.

Here are my notes

Initial observations

- There are not enough philanthropy dollars available to help every poor woman

- Self-help is the answer to women's development

- Hope, opportunity, and leadership are key factors in any successful international development program

About WORTH

- Designed to create an informal third sector banking institution in which poor women pool their own savings, make loans to one another with interest, and then split the dividends

- This results in two sources of income: the businesses that women start and the dividends from the informal third sector bank

- WORTH is not a micro-finance, or even a savings-based micro-finance program. It is an empowerment program for women, that happens to involve loans, literacy training, and income generation.

- WORTH's greatest impact is found in the renewed self-confidence and community recognition bestowed on the participating women.

Key Take Aways

- Impoverished women can and will help themselves

- The more we give, the more we create dependence

- Dependency does not empower

- When women come together, they talk about their successes

- Theories of viral uplift are not based in reality

- Online networks have not spread to education and learning-

- Empowerment is central to addressing the AIDS/HIV issue

Conclusion

Women are the life blood of so many communities. Investing in them is the best use of limited resources. Responsibility for making these investments rests in the hands of local communities.

There are people in the donor community who don't like the word "empowerment," and would rather not fund 'empowerment' programs.

As a result, Odell would like to:

1) Find a social action platform that could fund this kind of program on a scale greater than limited USAID dollars, and/or

2) Use the web to spread access to this sort of program in ways that bypass grant-making altogether

Thank You

A big thank you to Tom Munnecke of the Uplift Academy for hosting and recording Odell's presentation in 2006 and for directing a number of us to this video in recent weeks.