Change a Girl's Life Through Microentrepreneurship

It's 2015 already and we celebrate it with more news from the field and eternal gratitude for the almost 300 donations received over time.


As scheduled, we had a baking workshop and a business management workshop in early October, the disbursement of funds took place at the middle of the month for 21 new girls in two different locations . During both ceremonies we were privileged with the presence of Madam Justine, an experienced business owner and community leader in Tole (treasurer of Charity Sisters, one of our oldest groups of beneficiaries) her advice to the girls was invaluable. She talked about topics such as best business ventures to pursue, bookeeping, and the importance of cutting personal expenses, as she put it: "If you or your 'pikin' only have two dresses you clean one every day, but you don't touch the money from the business". She stayed long after the ceremony chatting and sharing her opinions with them.


How are the girls doing now? We have conducted follow-up meetings at random and the results are quite good, all interviewees reported more profit than in prior editions of the program, above the average of similar businesses according to our database. An interest fact when you consider that the individual funds disbursed were smaller than in prior editions (Because we want to disburse in two phases, an initial one to launch the business and a second one to give additional pushes to those proven worthy of it).The numbers? We can say, roughly, that Mae (Gateau Business) is having 10 dollars a week worth of profit, and Itoe (selling phone credit) 12, it might not look like much but it is: Considering cost of living in their communities, such revenues do improve substantially their quality of life. But more important, their capital was only 64 dollars, a figure they have already surpassed! Your money was well invested on them.

We saw Mae by chance just two days after the ceremony, as we were meeting someone else in Tole, and she surprised us with her diligence, she was already having a fully functional Gateau bussiness, and she brought some to try!

Itoe's case is also extraordinary, you must consider that phone credit has very low return on capital, to achieve the kind of revenue that she is managing, she must sell to an average of more than 240 people in one week! On an economically depressed community. We have advised her, and she had it in mind already, to complement the credit with other products with higher value added and we hope her revenues will increase even more in the future.


Not everything is perfect, the follow up showed that we still find it difficult for most girls to follow our advice on bookkeeping and we will work on how to improve the coaching sessions and materials, and make them more useful to their situation. We know that many of our donors are experienced in the field of development, and as always we will welcome any input on this or other issues of the program coming from you.


These past months we have also been using globalgiving microprojects, we use the tool to select and give extra assistance to those individuals that present extreme vulnerability or special potential for economic development (very often both). This is how we chose Aba(https://www.globalgiving.org/microprojects/build-a-tailoring-business-with-aba/) to support her future tailoring shop, and Itsa and Becky (https://www.globalgiving.org/microprojects/build-two-hair-saloons-with-itsa-and-becky/), for hairdressing ventures.


These are excellent news, but we must ensure the sustainability of the main project, the one that allow us to identify such cases in the first place, and we are looking for additional sources of revenue to make the program stronger and more consistent over time, in order to keep changing more and more lives. Because of this Reach Out is both trying to expand and put in place economic ventures that employ the vulnerable and finance the program (such as REO’s piggery) and to find institutions that could act as additional benefactors for it. We are absolutely sure the investment is worth it.


We hope the start of the year was great for you and that you know that for many of the girls it was you who made it to be great.


Thank you.