Why Change the Price of Sponsorship?

To maximize impact, Women for Women regularly reviews both the effectiveness of our program and the constantly shifting reality of women in conflict zones. This evaluation leads us to make regular adjustments to our programs as we target the most effective ways to help women rise from crisis and poverty to long-term stability and self-sufficiency.

Based on discussions with our country directors and careful consideration of how our program impacts women’s lives, we’ve come to believe that our “sisters” around the world will benefit significantly from additional business and life skills training.

Our Programs are Working:

Graduates of WfWI programs are earning an income, starting businesses or contributing to the economic welfare of their families:

  • 86% earn an income for their households
  • 25% employ at least one other person in the community through their income-generation activities
  • 67% save money regularly
  • Nearly half can send additional children to school who were unable to attend before the WfWI program

To cover the cost of these new investments, we are compelled to increase our monthly sponsorship price by $3 per month. We know that these are economically challenging times and appreciate the sacrifices you already make to support your “sisters” through Women for Women.

We hope you are able to continue to support women through our program. Specifically, these are the areas where we’ve deepened the program:

1. Business Cooperatives

We encourage women to move from sustenance agriculture to more stable commercial farming that will help them generate long-term income. And in order to succeed in commercial farming, we help them understand the importance of working together: By pooling their resources — both money and labor — they will be able to produce more in fewer work hours.

As a next step in the development of this program, we are now helping graduates form "business groups” of 20-40 women to jointly farm an area of land. As they progress, we will also encourage them to register their collaborative activity as a legal entity — creating formal cooperatives.

While we have long offered a series of classes in business skills, we are now expanding that training to include classes on managing a cooperative (purchasing and marketing, control and finance), structuring membership and working with local legal and regulatory structures. This training has begun in DRC and will begin in the other countries in late 2011.

2. Numeracy Training

Nearly 22,700 women currently enrolled with Women for Women cannot count to ten, add a column of numbers or count money. For women’s business ventures to thrive, it is imperative that we add basic numeracy training to our core program. Numeracy skills training not only allows women to deal with the costs and measurements that are part of their businesses, it also makes all of our training more effective.

3. Additional Rights Awareness Training

Over the years, individual WFW country offices have adjusted their own Life Skills programs based on the immediate local need. These efforts have produced a broad variance among programs in different countries. To ensure we are making the most of our collective knowledge, we recently underwent a review of all rights awareness content from every country program and used our analysis to develop a more robust and focused program manual. We are now ready to implement the result -- a more intensive and more nuanced universal rights awareness program.

4. Additional Impact Monitoring

We are increasing our capacity to monitor and evaluate the success of our WFW graduates and the impact of our specific programs on their future stability and livelihoods. This will allow us to more systematically make changes to the programs to reflect changing needs in the future.

These new programs were recently implemented throughout our country programs where they have already garnered exciting results, including an increase in income and participation in community decision-making.

We hope you will agree that these are necessary and exciting changes, and we look forward to updating you on the progress they reap in the coming year and beyond.