OneWorld.net (U.S.)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 21, 2005 Contact: Traer Sunley, VP Communications 202.466.5666

Pact’s WORTH program, a global women’s literacy and antipoverty initiative, has been named one of ten finalists in the first-ever Amazon.com Nonprofit Innovation Award. Individuals will be able to make contributions through the Amazon.com web site to the WORTH program through September 2005.

“This is a rare opportunity to leverage funding to help one million women and their families get out of poverty,” stated Sarah Newhall, president and CEO of Pact,” an international development organization that builds capacity from the ground up in over 50 countries. “WORTH proves that women not only can be responsible borrowers but also successful bankers and community leaders.”

WORTH, a self-help program, tackles one of the world’s toughest problems: the illiteracy and poverty that keep women and their families at a disadvantage throughout their lives. Poor women are enabled to focus on the power they already possess and given tools to teach themselves to read, write, build and govern village banks, and finance their own small and micro enterprises. Eight WORTH projects now operate in Africa and one in Asia. The finalists were selected by Amazon.com judges—including Téa Leoni, Henry Kissinger, Muhammad Ali, and Jeff Bezos, along with the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford University’s School of Business—from nearly 1,000 entries. Programs were judged on their innovativeness in addressing urgent, relevant and complex problems that demonstrate extraordinary inventiveness and break out of traditional approaches.

WORTH village banks are the only ones that encourage women to responsibly manage the entire banking process with their own savings and distribute interest dividends back to their membership. This gives women two revenue streams: from their village bank and their business. Ultimately, entire communities are helped as these newly confident women improve their livelihoods and go on to address critical social issues.

In just two and a half years, WORTH enabled some 125,000 women in Nepal to:

• More than double their savings, from $720,000 to $1,800,000
• Triple the number of women who can read and write
• Quadruple the number of women in business from 19,000 to 86,000
• Increase annual business income by eight-fold, from $1.2 million to more than $10 million

Equally important, 89,000 women reported increased decision-making authority in family planning, marriage of children, buying and selling property and education of girls—all reflections of WORTH’s success in empowerment.

Building on this success, Pact is now managing eight new WORTH projects in Africa and one in Asia. Several are in fragile states, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, where over 5000 women are now learning the sounds and letters of Kiswahili and beginning to save together.

Other projects are providing women overwhelmed by AIDS with hope and much needed income opportunities. In Kenya 2000 women independently started WORTH savings groups in Central, Western and Nyanza provinces even before WORTH began. Six thousand women are expected to participate by the time the project is over.

To support these new projects Pact has opened the WORTH Center for Gender and Women’s Empowerment in Nairobi, Kenya. Dr. Marcia Odell, whose vision has guided WORTH from its inception in Nepal, is the director: “Wherever I go in Africa and speak to women about WORTH, I hear “How soon can we start?” The center will coordinate materials development in local languages, training of women’s empowerment workers, cross-program sharing of information, and evaluation of results. Pact’s board of directors, led by Ruth Morgenthau, a microfinance and development expert, has lent its support to WORTH, approving over $500,000 of Pact’s unrestricted funds over the past three years to take the WORTH vision to Africa.

People can learn more about WORTH and make contributions on the Amazon.com website through September 30, 2005. The organization receiving the most dollars in contributions will receive a matching grant from Amazon.com worth up to $1 million.