My Nonprofit Reviews

It has been an honor to have worked with Village Enterprise over the past 4 years as a Board Member and donor. This is an organization that is significantly improving the lives of hundreds of thousands (and with your help over time millions) of people in rural Africa. The Village Enterprise graduation model has been proven to be highly effective in helping to lift people/families out of extreme poverty. The Village Enterprise team works in local villages to identify those who are willing and able to start their own small businesses, provides them business skills and other life skills to build and sustain their businesses over the long term, and provides the capital needed through grants along the way. It works and I have seen it first hand.

I was able to go to the field for the first time last month. I traveled with a few fellow Board Members and attended our annual Innovation Summit. This summit is just one example of Village Enterprise’s organizational commitment to cutting-edge business practices like human centered design, learning from failure, and adaptive management drive the team to deliver outstanding results for those we serve. While I am an executive in the technology industry in the Silicon Valley and I am used to innovative, hard-working, and results-oriented teams, I was in awe of how professional, capable, caring, and passionate the extended Village Enterprise team is in accomplishing our mission of ending extreme poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. I am confident that this is a team that can really do it.

I was also able to meet with a number of the families and small businesses we have helped over the past 30 years. These are folks like you and me who care about their families and their communities, are willing to work hard and simply want to provide for their families/send their children to school. But they don't have access to the mentorship and capital required to start a business and keep it up and running. Often times, it is just the initial funding to buy 2 goats to start a meat business, or capital to buy scrap metal to start making and selling cooking pans, or capital to buy groceries and supplies to start a restaurant. It also could be how to save money collectively across a community to help each other maintain their businesses. It is as simple as providing the right coaching and a little bit of seed funding (grants not loans) and all of a sudden these families can eat more than one meal per day, can afford school uniforms to send their children to school, and feel good about themselves that they are providing for their families. Our business owners smile a lot and they should be very proud of themselves!

There are many good nonprofits, aid agencies, volunteers, etc. who care to serve the greater good and I commend you. If you are looking for an organization which is (today) making a tangible, significant and lasting impact on a large number of peoples' lives (and has the team, model and desire to make an even greater impact), I hope you will look more closely at our incredible organization. Feel free to connect with me through Village Enterprise website to hear more!

Joe C.

It is an honor to be a Board Member at Village Enterprise because this is an organization that is making a tangible, long term positive impact on tens of thousands of peoples’ lives. The model works, the team is world-class and the donor base is passionate and expanding. As we continue to execute the core graduation model, improve the execution and expand the reach, we will help even more people lift themselves out of extreme poverty and improve their and their families and friends lives.