In recent years, the idea of self-help has gained favor as an approach that can help millions lift themselves out of poverty.  This powerful idea has led to a global proliferation of self-help groups.  These groups are powered by the enormous will and energy of their members.  Yet, to reach their full potential, they require technical support and services—from linkages to financial institutions to manage their members’ savings, to training on group management.  While self-help promoting institutions (SHPIs) and government programs have emerged to create and serve self-help groups, self-help groups often receive resources and tools from disparate sources that can be inconsistent and limited by conflicting goals, policies, unpredictable funding priorities and other constraints.  This reality places a natural bottleneck on the supply chain that serves self-help groups, and limits those who may benefit from self-help’s proven impact.

Reach offers a new approach that overcomes the service bottleneck and creates renewable funding sources by establishing entrepreneurial distribution channels for high-quality self-help resources.  Access to these resources will exponentially improve SHPI’s breadth and quality of self-help group services and in turn multiply their impact on poor people’s lives.  Reach combines two major innovations to achieve this goal:

• Recognizing that there is an exceptional stock of proven self-help resources available for dissemination to SHPIs both from Freedom from Hunger and other development organizations, Reach brokers access to these resources and makes them available for local adaptation and use.  

• To efficiently and effectively disseminate brokered resources at a massive scale, Reach utilizes a franchise mechanism to establish networks of social enterprises, or “service centers.”  These service centers
• promote and sell brokered self-help resources to SHPIs; and
• train and provide technical assistance to SHPIs to use those resources and improve and expand their services.
  

Regional Reach “capacity centers” support service centers by

• customizing self-help resources to the local context;

• facilitating linkages to complementary services and establishing partnerships to other organizations;

• promoting networking for learning and sharing of best practices; and

• engaging in research and development.

Launched in 2006, Reach capacity centers have been established in India, West Africa and Mexico.  As all three capacity centers ramp up service centers over the next couple of years, Reach intends for its services to impact more than one-and-a-half million poor people.