endPoverty.org helps enable the very poor of the world to lift themselves, their families and their communities out of poverty.  We provide small loans, business training and community development programs through a network of locally-led organizations in twelve countries to equip poor families to improve their lives.
 

Our Work

After more than two decades of work across the developing world, endPoverty.org understands that poor people in every country have skills and initiative that they want to use to lift their families out of poverty. Instead of a handout in the form of aid, many thousands of poor clients have received a hand up through training and small business loans.

Hungry for credit from sources other than local loan sharks, these clients have responded by demonstrating unmistakably the creditworthiness of the world's poor: Loan repayment rates in endPoverty-funded programs typically exceed 95 percent, surpassing the performance of many commercial institutions. Rather than cultivating dependency, this strategy of microenterprise creates self-supporting entrepreneurs and, as a consequence, healthier families and stronger local churches. (endPoverty.org programs do not discriminate on the basis of religious affiliation or impose any religious requirements on prospective or current clients.)

Developing countries also benefit from two unusual aspects of endPoverty's approach to relieving poverty. Rather than administering a large number of permanent branch offices around the world, we work with locally registered Christian organizations as partners, transferring required skills and capital. Also, each endPoverty project is designed to produce an indigenous, independent ministry, one that is expected to stand on its own financially within a few years.

Our History

In the 1970s, an American missionary in Sudan, Rev. Paris Reidhead, looked back on a quarter-century spent among the poor and resolved to find a way to match spiritual transformation with economic development. Wanting to avoid paternalism and mere handouts of aid, he envisioned poor entrepreneurs working their own way out of poverty, aided by neighbors who shared the same language and culture.

The founding of endPoverty in 1985 embodied that missionary's dream: a nonprofit, Christian organization that would enable poor entrepreneurs to start sustainable family businesses and pull themselves and their dependents out of poverty. Working through a network of local Christian organizations, endPoverty would offer business training, mentors, and funds for small loans, regardless of race, gender, religion, or creed.

That original vision remains at work today, as endPoverty provides technical assistance and capital to local programs across the developing world. Each year, these programs rely on the expertise and financial resources of endPoverty to offer real hope to thousands and thousands of families.