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REGION:
Latin America & Caribbean
INDUSTRY:
Supporting Enterprises
Oxfam is an international nonprofit that works in over 90 countries to right the wrongs of poverty, hunger and injustice. Oxfam's Women in Small Enterprise initiative, or WISE, empowers female entrepreneurs in Latin America by securing loans and providing business development training and personal coaching programs.
WISE needed a way to quickly track women entrepreneurs’ progress over time, starting when they first register as a prospective recipient, to building their business with funds and through the coaching they receive. Additionally, WISE works with local Spanish-speaking partners, including coaches, who need access to specific data from the central database to perform their job. With management who needs visibility into all activities and partners who need access to select information in Spanish, a challenge was how to grant everyone access to the right data.
TaroWorks has become much more of a project management tool for us because we're able to see what's going on at any particular time and it simplifies the administrative aspect of managing people.
Miranda Clarke, advisor for Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning
WISE is using TaroWorks to gather information about their female entrepreneurs as they go through the training and loan program by registering the women who apply, tracking their progress monthly and sharing this information with local partners.
WISE uses a Salesforce partner portal to give their local Guatemalan coaching partner access to relevant updated information about the entrepreneurs. Individual coaches see key data about their assigned entrepreneurs in Spanish so they can coordinate activities and follow-ups. Meanwhile, WISE managers can view aggregated information across all partners in English.
Now, all relevant partners have access to the same data that the Oxfam team in the home office has, which significantly reduces reporting time and allows for more time supporting the women entrepreneurs.
According to WISE, the program has been implemented successfully and efficiently through collaborating with external partners and leveraging their unique skill sets and resources to further broaden opportunities for women entrepreneurs. They also have expanded their focus for reaching lower-income communities by adapting their training approach to integrate women's rights awareness-raising and confidence-building exercises into their business and financial management training courses.
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