2024 Annual Report

Thanks to your incredible support, Village Enterprise has now transformed more than two million lives—including over 312,000 in the past year alone! This level of scale and impact is only possible because of the generosity of our supporters and the collective action that we are taking with governments, funders, agencies, and other NGOs. Because of these deep partnerships, we have the ability to lift more people out of extreme poverty than ever before.

Through our work with African governments, we are embedding our poverty graduation approach into social protection programs and training government staff on how to lift the most vulnerable out of extreme poverty. With funding from USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures and the Fund for Innovation in Development, we’re partnering with the Government of Rwanda with the goal of ending extreme poverty in the country by 2030. In Kenya, we’ve trained the government to implement our approach as part of the Kenya Social and Economic Inclusion Project, funded by the World Bank. We’re also working at the local level in Kenya—through funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we’re partnering with three county governments to lay the foundation for them to manage their own poverty graduation programs.

As our partnerships with African governments grow, we are simultaneously scaling DREAMS alongside our partners at Mercy Corps to build self-reliance among refugees. DREAMS combines our poverty graduation model with Mercy Corps’ expertise in market systems development, ensuring that refugees living in settlements have the resources, training, and local markets to lift themselves out of extreme poverty through entrepreneurship. As DREAMS has been transforming lives in refugee communities in Uganda and Ethiopia, our award-winning model is expanding to serve other populations living in extreme poverty. In total, DREAMS is on pace to transform 330,000 lives in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda by 2028.

Just as we are tailoring our approach to meet the needs of refugees through DREAMS, we are layering our model with additional resources to build resilience to climate change and significantly reduce child malnutrition in the drylands of northern Kenya as part of the USAID Nawiri project. In a region where climate change is prolonging droughts and exasperating resources, the number of households with malnourished children under the age of five decreased from 36% to just 4% among our most recently graduated cohort of entrepreneurs. This drastic reduction in child malnutrition is saving lives, and families are becoming more resilient to the effects of climate change as they increase their incomes, assets, savings, and food security.

As our entrepreneurs build resilience to climate change, they are also aiding in the protection of vital ecosystems and endangered species. Through partnerships with conservation leaders such as African Wildlife Foundation, Ngogo Chimpanzee Project, and Wildlife Conservation Society, our entrepreneurs are building sustainable livelihoods that further conservation efforts and safeguard forests and endangered chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos, and okapis in Congo-Brazzaville, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Uganda.

Despite all of this amazing progress, ending extreme poverty in Africa is still as urgent and pressing as ever. Families living in extreme poverty and those teetering on its edge remain highly vulnerable to shocks caused by climate change, conflict, and displacement. That’s why we’re working as hard as possible to scale our proven poverty graduation model and provide a dignified path out of extreme poverty for the most vulnerable women, refugees, and youth.

Thank you for joining us on this journey.

P.S. Pictured at the top of this report is Salome, who I met in 2016. Listen to her inspiring story on BBC World Service radio here.