John and Jacque Weberg have just made a one-year grant of $300,000 to continue their support of West Africa. This grant will expand the Reach initiative in West Africa (a.k.a. Avancons) which provides low-cost, high-quality training to local organizations wanting to reach very poor communities with microfinance and education services. The grant will also support the MAHP initiative in Benin and Burkina Faso, where we are working with our local partners to develop special financing products such as health savings, health loans and pre-paid health care as well as training them to deliver antimalarial bed nets and oral rehydration salts as a part of the Credit with Education service. In Mexico, our efforts to ensure that poor and rural communities have access to microfinance and education services just received a major boost from Nancy Swanson and Dorothy Largay of the Linked Foundation. Their one-year grant of $100,000 for Freedom from Hunger's Reach initiative in Mexico (a.k.a. Alcance) will help us train more many more Mexican financial institutions to reach out to communities that were once considered too distant and costly to serve sustainably. Additionally, Alcance will train them to deliver financial education to help poor families better manage household budgets, protect their assets, and carefully manage debt. Alcance's training package also offers Social Performance Management, a new capacity-building tool that helps staff monitor, manage and ensure progress. To learn more, contact Eden Rock, our Director of Institutional Giving, at erock@freedomfromhunger.org.