Escala Initiative

We won an award from the State Department for our work empowering women entrepreneurs.

ESCALA WINS STATE DEPARTMENT AWARD!!! The World Environment Center and its partners named the ESCALA-Peru program a winner of their first Empower Innovation Challenge. Sponsored by the U.S. State Department, the award recognizes the success of our curriculum and development network in benefiting micro, small and medium-sized enterprises...

The so-called "panacea for poverty" that is microfinance. Microfinance does nothing to create wealth for the poor or alleviate poverty. On top of that much of the lending is predatory. A GAO report found "the $1.1 billion budgeted by the U.S. Agency for International Development for microfinance programs from 2015 through 2018 had produced “little evidence of sustained effects. What works is basic business education targeted to women entrepreneurs and tailored to local culture and circumstances, along with seed capital grants This is what we do and we have the data to prove it.

Tiny Loans Were Going to Solve Global Poverty. Then Big Money Got Involved Microfinance has generated profits for banks and government aid agencies—and exploited millions.