Cash for 100 weeks: investing in women to change the future
Jeroen de Lange and Gitte Büch are founders of the 100WEEKS social enterprise. This online platform enables people to donate money directly to poor women in Rwanda, Ghana, Uganda and Ivory Coast. Women selected for this programme meet a number of strict criteria and receive eight euros a week for 100 weeks. We spoke with Jeroen and Gitte about their mission, the impact of direct cash transfers, and how 100WEEKS is transforming lives.
Founders Gitte and Jeroen
Empowering women
Gitte: ‘The objective is to empower women who are living in extreme poverty, allowing them to save and invest in their future.’
Jeroen: ‘I was a diplomat for a long time and lived with my wife and children in several African countries. I also worked for the World Bank in Uganda for two years.’
Gitte: ‘I lived in Tanzania, where I worked for local NGOs. After that, I lived in Vietnam with my family, where I worked for the United Nations.’
Jeroen: ‘When I was working for the World Bank in 2008, I heard about an experiment in Uganda in which women simply received money. The idea behind this was that people themselves know best what they need. After the World Bank, I felt restless, I wanted to do something in developmental aid. That’s when the two things came together: the radical new aid concept of giving cash unconditionally and my professional experience. I jotted my idea down on a sheet of paper and set up the foundation.’
Gitte: ‘And then you called me. Jeroen and I have been friends since secondary school. He knew that after I returned from Africa, I had been head of communications at War Child. The concept of giving money is great: it’s a simple solution to a complex problem. Using a similar model to Airbnb, we connect supply and demand through the 100WEEKS platform: the donors and the women in poverty who receive money.
Eight euros every Monday
Jeroen: ‘Our basic objective is to be as cost-effective and large-scale a vehicle as possible for lifting people out of poverty. We give the money to women because numerous studies show that they generally use money more sensibly than men do. Unlike men, female participants spend the money on their entire family.’
Gitte: ‘Every Monday, the women in our programme receive eight euros of mobile money on their phone. Besides money, they also follow classes in entrepreneurial skills, hygiene, and sexual and reproductive health. The women participants support each other, they save together and also provide loans to each other. Learning to manage money is part of the training.’
Jeroen: ‘When they start, we also assess the participants’ mental wellbeing. Many of them are depressed. They are so deeply ashamed of their poverty that they no longer even dare to attend church services. Poverty is not just a lack of money, it’s also a lack of knowledge and social connections. These women are caught in a poverty trap. That’s true of roughly one billion people all across the globe. It is almost impossible to escape this trap by yourself. But once they’ve been on our programme for a few months, you see a turnaround. The money helps the women regain their wellbeing and dignity.’
‘The concept of giving money is great: it’s a simple solution for a complex problem.’
A permanent solution
Gitte: ‘We constantly measure the impact of our programme and donors receive regular updates. The programme really stops after 100 weeks, it is not open-ended. The objective is for these women to stay out of extreme poverty. The results are incredibly positive. Over 80% of participants accomplish the objective. One person bought a plot of farmland, another opened a hairdressing salon, and a group of women got together and set up a pig-breeding farm. The effects are permanent. In other words, we have found the solution for helping individual people out of poverty.’
Jeroen: ‘The Sint Antonius Stichting has been crucial for 100WEEKS. We started in 2015 with 5000 euros from friends and relatives. The SAS was the first major philanthropic fund to demonstrate faith in our idea. Because they were willing to take a risk, we were able to take a giant leap forward. That would never have been possible so quickly without their financial support.’