OUR MISSION is to provide ways for people living in poverty to improve their quality of life so that they can provide themselves and their families with the basics needed for life and thereby gain new hope for their futures and their children’s futures.

In 2018, New Hope started to implement a new model of income generation. It’s called Village Savings and Loans Associations or VSLA. People, mostly women, living in extreme poverty, are invited to form groups of about 20. Seed money—a one time donation—is provided by New Hope to the group to get them started. Then agents trained by New Hope teach the groups how to self manage, including a plan for taking turns taking loans to create or expand small businesses or meet critical needs. Over time our agents are involved less and less until the group eventually continues on independently.

It takes approximately $50 per person to start a VSLA. An entire group can get started for approximately $1000. We have many groups just waiting for the needed funds so that they can start working towards escaping poverty.

For people who previously had incredibly small incomes and certainly no access to a loan to start a small business, or even to pay for critical things like much needed medicines, this has amazing potential for wonderful life change, independence and a lot of new hope!

Zerfay is 33 years old with 5 in her family. She used to sell veggies, but has slowly moved up to selling household items. Her equity when she was selling vegetables was about 5,000 birr, now it is about 100,000 birr! She is doing really well!

While in Ethiopia I got to visit a New Hope VSLA group in a town called Merawi. They have 19 members. They were started in the VSLA model and they took turns taking loans from their group to start and expand individual businesses. They worked at their businesses for 2 years while saving to do a joint venture.

Then, while continuing to do their own businesses, they started their joint venture which is a wholesale shop that sells juice, water, canned goods etc by the case. They take turns running the joint store and after their turn, the person in charge for the day takes the day’s profits to the bank and brings back the receipt and gives the next person the key for the next day.

At first the group was reluctant about starting a VSLA because – they couldn’t see how they could save money when they hardly had enough to eat. But after a few training times they started to see the potential. Now they say “we love it!”. They said they are so happy and don’t know how to thank New Hope enough. They say they are “growing and growing”, and they are thankful to God.