How your money works

Giving should not require faith. Here is the whole mechanism: what splits where, what it buys, and how we will prove it.

Given so far

₦0 · 0 givers

₦0

Into their hands

Unconditional cash grants

₦0

Into the Empowerment Fund

Counselling, literacy, schooling

0 of 20

Women fully funded

0 have received something

What that has actually bought

Converted at Abuja purchasing prices. Estimates, corrected as we buy at scale.

Nothing yet — this fills in with the first gift, and every figure on it is arithmetic you can check.

The Rising Index

0 of 20 women assessed

Our mission is to move a widow from survival to self-reliance. This is how we hold ourselves to it. Six dimensions, scored 0–100 by someone who sits with her — not calculated from how much money arrived.

Surviving

Getting through the week. Any shock — illness, rent, a school bill — undoes her.

Steadying

Trading again and planning past the week, but still thin against a bad month.

Standing

Earning reliably, children in school, able to absorb a shock without falling back.

No woman has been assessed yet, so every stage reads zero. We could have filled this with plausible numbers. We would rather you saw the honest state of it: the baseline visits happen first, then this becomes the number we are judged on.

Income security25%Does she earn enough, reliably, to feed her household without help?
Trade restored20%Is she trading again — stock on the shelf, machine running, customers returning?
Children in school20%Are the children she is responsible for enrolled, with fees current?
Financial literacy15%Can she price, save, separate business money from household money?
Shelter and safety10%Is her housing secure, and free of the threat of eviction or seizure?
Voice and standing10%Can she hold her ground with in-laws, landlords and officials — and does she have the circle behind her?

Every gift splits in two

50%

Direct cash grant

Paid to her, unconditionally. Cash transfers to women in poverty are among the best-evidenced interventions there are, precisely because they do not require a stranger to guess what a household needs.

50%

The Empowerment Fund

Career counselling, financial literacy, education and personal development, delivered to the whole circle. A grant alone can be spent once. This is the part that compounds.

What $50 becomes

$25.00(₦35,500)— Straight to her hands
Cash grant, paid directly to her, to spend on her trade and her children.
$25.00(₦35,500)— Into the Empowerment Fund
Career counselling, financial literacy, education and personal development — in her name.

What an amount actually buys

Naira figures at ₦1,420to the dollar. These are estimates from Lady Nworah’s own purchasing in Abuja and will be corrected as we buy at scale.

$10₦14,200A week of food for a widow and two children.
$25₦35,500One session of career counselling.
$50₦71,000A term of school fees for one child in a public school.
$100₦142,000Restocks a small provisions stall.
$250₦355,000A treadle sewing machine and starter fabric.
$355₦504,100A woman's full ask at the lower end — her grant and her training.

How we will measure it

An impact claim is worth nothing without a date attached. This is our schedule.

Before
Baseline, on camera
Every woman records her situation in her own words before a naira is spent: household size, income, trade, what she lost, what she needs.
At the gift
You see the split
The donate screen shows the exact naira figure going to her hand and to her training before you confirm. No overhead is hidden inside the number.
90 days
Grant receipt and first review
She confirms receipt. We record what she spent it on and whether the trade started. Published as a portfolio update, not a press release.
6 months
Training completion
Sessions attended in financial literacy, career counselling and personal development, and what she can now do that she could not do before.
12 months
Income and independence
Monthly income against her baseline; children in school; whether she still needs emergency support. The number we care about most is how many women no longer need us.

What we cannot promise yet

We are a young organisation. The 90-day and 12-month reports above are a commitment, not a track record.
Payment processing takes a fee before the money reaches Nigeria, and the naira moves. The split you see is of the amount that arrives.
A registered 501(c)(3) partner is coming on board shortly, which will make US gifts tax-deductible. Until that is in place, gifts made here are not deductible.
The Rising Index depends on someone visiting each woman. Until those baseline visits are done it reads zero, and we would rather show you a zero than a guess.

Give to the fund

Or fund one woman’s full ask — she names her own figure, from ₦500,000 to ₦800,000.