Five-Year Report July 2017 - June 2022

Dear Friends & Partners,

In the past five years, Village Enterprise has trained more than 83,000 first-time entrepreneurs, launched 29,000 businesses, and impacted the lives of 557,000 women, children, and men living in extreme poverty. To put those numbers in perspective, this is more than double the impact we had in the previous five years. This level of scale has only been possible because of your support.

The last five years have been a time of incredible growth and innovation at Village Enterprise. On top of deepening our impact in Uganda and Kenya, we’ve expanded our work to Rwanda, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, and Mozambique. We have also made significant improvements to our program, including the implementation of a powerful adaptive management system, a streamlined and more interactive training curriculum, and the use of digital technologies such as videos and mobile cash transfers to improve our efficiency and impact. And our organization has grown from just over 100 employees in 2017 to a world-class team that today is 440 members strong (97% in Africa) and growing quickly.

These improvements and the hard work of our stunning team led to many of our biggest achievements of the past five years, including:

• The success of the Village Enterprise Development Impact Bond, which was proven to have cost-effective, sustained impact for 95,000 women, children, and men in Uganda and Kenya despite the many challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic.
• New strategic partnerships with local and national governments to incorporate our graduation model into government programs in Kenya and Rwanda.
• $19.8M in funding secured for DREAMS for Refugees, which will impact the lives of more than 200,000 people in Uganda and Ethiopia.

These achievements come at a crucial moment in Africa. The sudden onset of the pandemic in 2020 reversed decades of progress in poverty alleviation on the continent. The war in Ukraine has since sent the prices of food, fuel, and fertilizer soaring—hitting families living in extreme poverty the hardest and pushing communities to the brink of famine. And climate change threatens to push another 100 million into extreme poverty by 2030.

In many ways, our work has never been more important than it is at this very moment. We are fully committed to ending extreme poverty in rural Africa by equipping the most vulnerable women, refugees, and youth with skills and resources to launch sustainable businesses, build assets and savings, and adapt to the threats posed by climate change, conflict, and future crises. Through results-based funding and collective action with local and national governments, NGOs, funders, and private sector companies, we plan to impact the lives of 20 million people by 2030.

Thank you for being by our side these past five years. We are excited to go even further together in the years to come.