Raising the Village
▲ Jennifer with her children outside their home in Kaliro. Photo from Raising the Village, "A Mother's Resilience"
This is a brief overview of a high-impact organization working to reduce poverty.
Raising the Village (RTV) transforms the livelihoods of entire villages living below the poverty line in Uganda and Rwanda by working to identify and address local bottlenecks to productivity—providing support in small business operations, improving agricultural inputs, and training local farmers on modern farming practices.
We’re recommending RTV because this is one of the most cost-effective interventions we have identified working to improve livelihoods, addressing barriers to economic development while building sustainable community leadership.
What problem are they trying to solve?
In rural Uganda, 14 million rural people live on less than $2.15 per day. These communities face multiple interconnected challenges that keep them trapped in poverty: low agricultural productivity, limited market access, poor business skills, and lack of financial services. Typical households rely heavily on subsistence farming with low-yield crops and outdated farming techniques, leaving them vulnerable to seasonal food shortages and extreme weather events.
Traditional anti-poverty programs often focus on individual households rather than whole communities, missing the opportunity to create multiplier effects through local economic growth. Most livelihood interventions come with high costs per person reached, limiting their ability to scale across entire countries with significant ultra-poor populations.
What do they do?
RTV provides large income gains to entire rural communities living below the poverty line for a fraction of the cost of comparable interventions by exploiting the economies of scale and community multiplier effects of simultaneously partnering with entire clusters of villages. They work with each household for two years before transitioning the program to village leadership while maintaining systematic followup and community engagement.
Their two-year engagement model begins with a community co-design process to tailor interventions to local needs. Some components of RTV’s program include:
- Offering high-yield, climate-resilient seeds and other agricultural inputs to each household
- Providing practical training in agricultural practices, and one-on-one technical support
- Increasing the number and profitability of small businesses through Village Savings and Loan Associations, enterprise selection training, and market linkages
The six-month intensive phase is followed by eighteen months of coaching, mentorship, and ongoing support to ensure adoption of new practices and gradual transition to local leadership. By simultaneously addressing multiple barriers to economic development while building local capacity, they create lasting change that continues after the program ends.
Why do we recommend them?
Our endorsement of RTV is based on early access results of a recent randomized controlled trial, which found that monthly income increases by 25% and consumption by 10% for all households in villages that participated in RTV’s program. Follow-up surveys by independent evaluators found even more impressive consumption gains of 40% during the five months leading up to crop harvest, when food is typically scarce. Both the size of the income gains and the applicability of the evidence are very rare among interventions we have encountered.
RTV also demonstrates unusual commitment to data-driven program improvement, incorporating frequent feedback and analytics to improve their approach every year. Their real-time tracking has allowed RTV to cut programs that don’t produce sufficient return on investment—such as livestock distribution, which they discontinued in 2019—and to expand particularly effective programs—such as distribution of more new seed varieties. As a result, the organization's approach is remarkably efficient, costing only about $30 per person reached—several times less expensive than comparable livelihood programs while showing larger income gains.
What would they do with more funding?
More funding would enable RTV to accelerate their scaling. With sufficient funding to scale, RTV’s success in Uganda and Rwanda could position them to expand their model to additional countries, partnering with national governments to eventually institutionalize their approach—all at an exceptionally low cost. This represents an opportunity to dramatically improve economies for tens of millions of people living in ultra-poverty across the region.
