Spark Microgrants is an organization working in Africa that provides cash grants and development support to small villages in order to encourage long-term economic growth. Through its two key pillars, durable livelihoods and collective agency, Spark Microgrants has helped more than 1,300 villages develop durable livelihoods in Africa. What started as a small initiative in Rwanda in 2010 has now reached more than 1 million people in Rwanda, Malawi, Uganda, Ghana, and Burundi.

The Three-Phase Method

Spark Microgrant’s method is particular, as it wants to avoid imposing its practices and ideas on the citizens of the villages, so it adopted a village-driven process. This means that the organization puts the decision-making for the projects in the hands of those who will be using it, allowing them to build on pre-existing indigenous practices.

In fact, the first phase of the development project requires the village to identify its local assets, so that the economic growth that follows stems from pre-existing resources and not external, unsustainable support. Then, through six months of village planning meetings open to all village members, they must develop a vision or plan for how to utilise these resources in their favour, and then must decide on a method through which to achieve this vision. Opening these meetings to the entire village is an essential component of this phase, as it shifts the power in the village from a small group of male elites to women and men of all ages and socio-economic status.

For the second phase of development, the village receives the first half of its microgrant to invest in its chosen project. Not only does this allow them to test the success of their chosen project before they receive the second half, but it also allows the village to begin a savings program. Both of these are crucial to the success of the program because they ensure that the village can become self-reliant and will be able to prosper long after Spark Microgrants stops supporting them.

For the final phase, Spark Microgrant monitors the success of the program for two years to ensure that the chosen investments are prosperous. Additionally, they ensure that the benefits of the program are experienced by all members of the village, allowing all members to emerge from extreme poverty and stay out of it for the foreseeable future.

Current Impact

In the last 15 years, Spark Microgrants has had immense success in building durable livelihoods in Africa. By partnering with other local organizations, it has been able to expand its expertise of the region’s indigenous practices and widen its impact. It uses its two key pillars to quantify its success thus far. For “collective agency,” it tracks growth in citizen engagement in the project, specifically in village meetings. This is invaluable to the program, as it fosters a deep trust in the collective action of the village. In fact, they have seen a 215% increase in women’s civic engagement, proving that the open village meetings have succeeded in encouraging all village members to participate, creating more diverse governing bodies.

For the second pillar of “durable livelihoods,” Spark Microgrants tracks economic factors such as growth in assets, savings, and food security. It reports a 249% increase in median household asset values in the villages they have worked with as well as an 160% increase in household savings. Whilst this data clearly demonstrates the charity’s success, the most impressive … is that each village has seemed to use its revenues and success to launch its own similar programs in other villages. This is significant because it creates an impact multiplier, essentially doubling Spark’s impact for every village it works with.

Spark Microgrant’s efforts in building durable livelihoods in Africa are not only immense in results and statistics, but they also encourage self-reliance and sustainable long-term impact. Its flexible systems allow its models to be adaptable and unique to each village, creating lasting change and breaking generational poverty.

– Vittoria Cortese

Vittoria is based in Washington DC, USA and focuses on Good News for The Borgen Project.

Photo: Flickr