Does It Last?

There was one nagging question about WEP, the answer to which I would not learn until years later. Since these groups operated mostly independently, would they survive without WEP’s support? As it turned out, events allowed us to answer this important question.

Eight years later, Linda Mayoux, an internationally rec­ognized expert on women’s empowerment and microfinance, carried out a study to see whether the groups survived.⁵ They had—a large portion, at least. Of the 6,500 WEP groups in 2000, the i,500 most promising groups had received substantial additional training in record keeping and man­agement. The study, looking only at these better-trained groups, determined that two-thirds were still saving and lending. Most of us feared that all the groups would have collapsed. The biggest surprise, however, was that the “Sali Coulibalys” of Nepal had trained almost exactly the same number of new groups as the number of older groups that had disbanded—completely on their own initiative. The total number of savings groups had remained steady through eight years of unrest, without NGO support. On top of that, the number of members per group increased by four on average, and the size of the groups’ loan funds quadrupled. The qual­ity of the replicated groups was as high as that of the staff- trained groups. Unfortunately, we did not know the fate of the five thousand groups that received less training. For me, the test of the success of a program is whether it survives over time and becomes embedded into the fabric of how vil­lages resolve the complex problems that beset them. WEP met that test.