What is $.05 worth?
Turns out the Self-Help Groups we’ve helped sponsor are saving $.05 per person, per week. Now, altogether the 87 groups have collected about 77, 000 ETB. Purchasing power is hard to calculate because what someone pays for out in a rural village (grain, seed, clothes, water) is not what you typically buy in the city, and if it is, the price is most likely different. When we stay at a hotel, we pay about 650 ETB. That’s about 13 times what an individual SHG member in the West Arsi district has saved so far. On the surface, it doesn’t sound like much.
What is $.05 worth? That’s what we are going to attempt to demonstrate in the coming months through our summer awareness/fundraising campaign. We won’t give away all our secrets, but from what we’ve seen, the $25.00 (US) one-time cost of training a new self-help group member is most likely the greatest return on investment you’ll ever see when it comes to development initiatives.
