Our Programs
Forward Movement's work is multi-faceted and evolves as the needs of people changes.
With Social Enterprises
The work of social enterprises multiplies impact across the whole communities. ATEC is a social enterprise which distributes its eCookstoves which produce no harmful gases, replacing health and environmentally dangerous traditional fuels for cooking in poor communities. It distributed six hundred such stoves in Bangladesh.
Kuli Kuli's founder, while serving in Peace Corps in Africa at the age of twenty-six, suffered weaknesses due to protein deficiency since meat was rarely available in the villages she worked. Local women introduced her to the soup made from the bean pods of the fast growing moringa tree. After returning hone, she founded Kuli Kuli as a Certified Beneficial Corporation in California. The women in Africa grow the trees and send dried leaves and bean pods to the company where they are processed into tea bags, nutritional shakes, and moringa powder that is uses as a health supplement. Over time, the organization became a meaningful partnership, sharing up to seven million dollar profits with the African women. About thirty-eight million trees have been grown and have supported up to 4,500 lives.
Negros Women for Tomorrow Foundation builds sanitary toilets in the Phillippines.
With Microfinance Institutions
Forward Movement extends loans to projects posted on the non-profit Kiva.org platform. Kiva in turn has a relationship with microfinance institutions in countries where they work. These institutions interact with borrowers, administer the loans, and provide oversight. Forward Movement's relationship with these institution is through Kiva, but also directly in several cases.
Kashf Foundation is a microloan institution in Pakistan who mentor and support women entrepreneurs of small businesses. We work with Kashf directly as well as with Kiva. Our loans support women in raising milk giving buffaloes, grocery store, sewing and embroidery home businesses, and flower cultivation. In one year alone we supported ninety-nine rural school renovation projects of Kashf on the Kiva platform.
Palestine for Credit and Development (FATEN) is a non-profit micro finance institution operating in the Occupied West Bank of Palestine and Gaza. We have participated in several hundred projects of reconstruction of destroyed homes, sustainable agriculture, empowering refugees and displaced families to set up small businesses.
For Poverty Alleviation
Millions of people around the world desire to be lifted out of poverty but lack resources and capital to make their lives better, due to failed government policies, or the corporate capitalism that ignores them. We reach out to these people for help to help themselves by starting small businesses for income generation. We have participated in 2,700 projects on Kiva platform that has touched more than 4,000 lives in 74 countries. These projects include small businesses of food production, retail stores, sewing and clothing sales, transportation taxis and rickshaws. construction trades, and auto repairs.
In Mali, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad, Ghana, Equatorial New Guinea, Senegal, Ivory Coast, and other African countries, we work with groups from villages o support livestock production on the Kiva platform.
In Pakistan we partner with Pravali Welfare Trust in the rural Sindh province to give a herd of goats to widows who sell milk and raise offsprings for sale. In the Tharparker desert region of Sindh, we distribute fruit tree saplings every monsoon season that have been specially developed by the local agricultural department for that climate.