Collaboration to Change the World

How can a small organization end chronic hunger around the world? Our commitment to collaboration and sharing is sparking worldwide action to amplify the self-help efforts of chronically hungry people.

Collaboration to Change the World

A billion people or more live on $1/day or less. No single organization is large enough to reach everyone, but if we all work together, we can defeat poverty and hunger. Throughout Freedom from Hunger's history, we found ways to share our innovations with other organizations. By working and collaborating with many local organizations and sharing freely with others, we're accelerating the spread of value-added microfinance and building a "community of practice" that ensures microfinance will continue to improve and meet the needs of the very poor.

What We Learn, We Share

Since our founding in 1946, we have created and rigorously tested new ways to help the hungry poor. And we have shared our successful innovations with other organizations on the frontlines of serving the poor, reaching far more people than Freedom from Hunger could reach on its own.

In the late 1980s, Freedom from Hunger recognized the potential power of microfinance to support the self-help efforts of women of chronically hungry families. Women living in such poverty were being overlooked by organizations who viewed chronic hunger, poor health and rural location as insurmountable barriers to participation in microfinance. We developed Credit with Education and later Saving for Change to address these obstacles by combining microfinance with health and business education and access to health care. Rigorous research provides evidence that value-added microfinance can create positive change for the chronically hungry poor and be sustainable and replicable. Learn more about Credit with Education and Saving for Change.

Spreading the Word that Microfinance can do More

Today, close to one hundred organizations are delivering value-added microfinance to a million and a half people (and growing rapidly). By supporting these local partner organizations with training and technical assistance, our staff of fewer than 50 is reaching far more chronically hungry women and families than we could by acting alone. This is real leverage of our financial and human resources.

When we choose partners well, we tap into local wisdom and knowledge that ensures our innovation is adopted and adapted in ways that are culturally, economically and socially relevant. We learn from our partners about the unique challenges in their service areas and how, together, we might overcome them. By training partner organizations to deliver the services—and training them to train others—we ensure that the programs become locally owned, spontaneously shared, and sustained beyond our original collaboration.

We go further to share what we learn with others, offering our research reports, technical guides and training materials, through publications, conferences, training workshops and customized technical assistance. The result is that many other organizations have learned about and created their own versions of value-added microfinance without our direct collaboration.

The Challenge Ahead

Already there are many examples of local organizations making value-added microfinance work not only for the poor but for their own bottom lines. Yet there remain skeptics claiming that value-added microfinance is too complicated and costly to be sustained by most local organizations. Freedom from Hunger and its partners accept the challenge to show that costs can be driven down enough and the services can be made simple enough to allow more and more local organizations to afford and manage them. Together we are building a "community of practice" among organizations committed to value-added microfinance—to share lessons learned and generate more evidence of the costs and benefits of value-added microfinance, as well as to invite more organizations to learn how to integrate microfinance, education and health-protection services. This coalition of organizations and this additional evidence are the next steps to further spread value-added microfinance throughout the world to help hundreds of millions of chronically hungry women and families who need microfinance and more.

If you would like to have copies of Freedom from Hunger's technical guides, curricula, research reports and published articles, visit Our Publications.