Paper
Pact's WORTH Model: A Savings-led Approach to Economic Security and Combating HIV/AIDS
How can participant-owned village banking help women address problems like HIV/AIDS?
Download
17 pages
This paper presents an overview of Pact’s award-winning WORTH initiative. It states that WORTH:
- Is an innovative, rapidly scalable and low-cost program of women helping women through participant-owned village banking;
- Gives importance to literacy and savings, investing groups of rural women with the skills and resources required to establish a self-sustaining, self-managed village bank built on equity rather than debt;
- Has demonstrated impact, most notably in Nepal, where:
- 125,000 women formed over 6,000 WORTH groups in less than three years;
- Tripled their literacy;
- Doubled their savings;
- Increased the number of women with micro enterprises four-fold;
- Saw their business incomes rise eight times to more than $10 million
- Has crafted the village banking process into an explicit platform for women to take control of the issues facing their families and communities, including HIV/AIDS;
- Has the capacity to rapidly scale-up financial services in rural areas that most microfinance institutions do not access;
- Is a dynamic platform for empowering women to generate a dense network of community based responses HIV/AIDS and other issues.
The paper:
- Relates the genesis of the WORTH model;
- Examines the innovations that underpin how WORTH works;
- Discusses WORTH’s evolving deployment against HIV/AIDS in a variety of hard-to-serve locales around the globe.
