I am delighted to provide our THRIVE 2030 annual report for fiscal year 2023.
As engaged readers of this newsletter, you will remember that World Vision’s THRIVE (Transforming Household Resilience in Vulnerable Environments) model was rolled out in five countries from 2013 through 2023 and equipped over 375,000 people to begin lifting themselves out of extreme poverty. Having learned and studied what made THRIVE work so well, our THRIVE 2030 program aims to provide 10 million people in 11 countries with access to the tools they need to leave extreme poverty behind — for good!
While I want you to keep reading the newsletter, including the report itself, a very incomplete report summary is that we are actually ahead of our projections for what our start-up year would look like. That is quite something when I think of the management challenge of scaling a program that reached 375,000 people to reach 10,000,000 people. This is very significant growth and change.
Finally, let me warmly encourage you to attend our Economic Empowerment Forum in Tacoma, Washington, on 23 and 24 August 2024. We are bringing our field work to you, and it will be a simply magnificent time of learning and engaging. If you would like to attend, contact your World Vision representative, or send us a note!
In focus:THRIVE 2030 report for fiscal year 2023
THRIVE 2030 is the massive scale-up of the most effective, replicable, and cost-effective components of World Vision’s original THRIVE model. From 2013 to 2023, our original model helped over 375,000 people in five countries begin their move out of extreme poverty. Our new model, THRIVE 2030, aims to ensure that 10 million people in 11 countries have access to the tools they need to lift themselves out of extreme poverty.
In addition to investing in some key enablers like technology for moving money and information digitally, the four main components of THRIVE 2030 are:
Biblical Empowered Worldview training
Getting people into savings groups
Providing training for market knowledge and access
Lending to savings groups
As can be seen in the report link below, THRIVE 2030 has started strongly. In our first year, the main focus was putting in place the institutional foundations for massive program scale-up. That included hiring and training staff, identifying, engaging, and training key partners, and starting a large-scale household registration process which will allow us to better track family-level change and impacts.
In addition to laying the foundations, we also began building. Our four main programming components began rolling out in some places, and in total we reached 50% more people than our projected goal.
At the same time, some countries had other work to do. We finished our original THRIVE programs in Zambia, Rwanda, and Honduras, with Honduras working on completion until the very end of the year. In terms of directly participating smallholder farmers, Zambia reached 15,917 or 106% of target, Rwanda reached 15,287 or 97% of target, and Honduras reached 17,020 or 122% of target. We completed THRIVE with 74,523 participating smallholder farmers, or 107% of our original target, with 376,226 total beneficiaries.
As one would fully expect when completing one program and rolling out a large new one, not everything everywhere went perfectly. We saw overperformance and underperformance. We found some managers are overly enthusiastic when they project what they can achieve, and some are overly cautious. We found that adopting the simpler, more streamlined THRIVE 2030 model was sometimes harder than first imagined. We also found that some communities to which we expanded THRIVE 2030 had savings groups already trained in Biblical Empowered Worldview and ready to go — they were literally just waiting for us.
Overall, there is lots of good news as THRIVE 2030 gets going — things are moving well. Thanks be to God!
Mark your calendar: Economic Empowerment Forum in August
Friday, August 23 (all day), and Saturday, August 24 (half day), 2024
Tacoma, Washington
Please plan to join us for the first-ever U.S.-based in-person Economic Empowerment Forum! As one of our THRIVE 2030 investors, you'll get a close-up look at this work from the setting of a waterfront location in the summer majesty of the Pacific Northwest. We'll be joined by senior World Vision leaders, field program staff, technical teams, and THRIVE 2030 implementers. We expect to deliver our final reports from TANGO on the original THRIVE programs and dive deeply into THRIVE 2030's implementation successes and challenges.
We hope you'll join us after the forum concludes on Saturday for an afternoon and evening enjoying the waterfront and a delicious seafood dinner (details to come!).
Our goal is for this to be an informative and highly engaging experience, filled with fellowship and fun.
Hotel registration links will be coming in the spring. In the meantime, please check on flights and tell your friends!
THRIVE impact story: "Peter, onions, and growing money"
We met Peter in a video at the beginning of THRIVE in Zambia. Click here to see what Peter has been up to and how his community is doing.
Partner with us
Give to the Economic Empowerment Global Fund: THRIVE 2030 to help us reach 10 million people in 11 countries with the tools they need to lift themselves out of extreme poverty. Tools include Biblical Empowered Worldview, savings groups, market knowledge and access, and lending to savings groups (i.e., FAST loans).
Give praise for the hard work of our THRIVE 2030 field and implementation teams who have been successfully launching the new model at significant scale.
Give praisethat the El Niño event has ended the drought in the Horn of Africa (although bringing some severe flooding) and is so far less severe than previous events in Southern Africa (which is now seeing lower than average rainfall).
Pray for our microfinance subsidiary, VisionFund International, to discern how to proceed with new opportunities to expand our “Lending to Savings Groups” model.
Pray for our field teams as they finish the current round of household registrations, move into the first key step of wide-scale Biblical Empowered Worldview training, and then organize people into savings groups. These are the core foundations for all the rest of our work.
Pray for the teams in Ghana, Honduras, Senegal, and Vietnam as they begin their rollout of THRIVE 2030.
Thank you for your faithful partnership!
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