At Trickle Up, our mission is to partner with women in extreme poverty to build economic opportunity and drive inclusion. We work primarily with women and highly vulnerable populations, partnering with them as they join savings groups, start small businesses, and build resilient livelihoods.
Trickle Up’s Glen & Mildred Robbins Leet Humanitarian Award is presented annually to an individual whose actions have made a transformative difference in the poverty alleviation sector and who embodies Trickle Up’s mission and values. This year, the award was presented at our annual Gala to Frank DeGiovanni, who joined Trickle Up as a board member in 2017, not long after he retired from the Ford Foundation in April 2016 as a Senior Advisor to the foundation’s President.
Previously, DeGiovanni served as Ford’s Director of the Financial Assets unit and was a founder of the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor/Ford graduation community-of-practice. This was a large-scale initiative launched nearly twenty years ago to expand the graduation approach in a variety of countries and contexts. DeGiovanni is an architect, shaper, and champion for the graduation approach that lifts people out of poverty—an approach that has anchored and guided Trickle Up’s work for two decades.
“I am continually moved to observe that some of the most vulnerable people in society, mostly women and people who have long believed that they don’t matter, begin to realize that they count, and that they have rights,” said Frank DeGiovanni as he took the stage to accept his award. “Trickle Up was the first organization to implement the graduation approach with the most traditionally excluded people, including refugees, people with disabilities, and women from particularly vulnerable groups.”
At the event, President and CEO Lauren Hendricks presented two stories of Trickle Up participants from our MPowered project in India to highlight the profound impact of the graduation approach. “The MPowered project has helped women form microenterprises, while introducing them to smartphones and digital coaching that helped them grow their businesses,” said Hendricks. “Last March, external evaluators found that it delivered a 10x social return on investment for every rupee invested in the project, 97% of households of participants did not face any food shortages over six months, and smartphone ownership increased from 8% to 61% of women.”
The results are clear: the graduation approach makes families far more food secure than they were before, and women are newly able to engage with digital platforms and services that can help them manage their savings and learn new skills to take their microenterprises to the next level.
Meet two of our participants, Panchasila Kharsel and Pushpanjali Baccha, and learn how Trickle Up’s work has empowered them not only to build their enterprises and obtain a steady income, but to become leaders and mentors in their communities.
Meet Panchasila and Pushpanjali
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