Social Entrepreneurship

Decades of prescriptive aid programs have sidelined communities facing poverty from the very programs meant to uplift them. Villages are littered with empty school buildings and broken water taps because they were built without community buy-in. AHI was founded to address this problem. It serves as a national justice organization working to achieve social justice, gender equality, and poverty eradication. We reach out to the poorest and most vulnerable people in South Sudan to help them realize their rights to services such as food, shelter, work, education, and healthcare; and to give them a voice in the decisions that affect their lives.

AHI has designed a novel approach to empower communities facing poverty to design and drive their own economic and civic development. Grounded in community-driven development, AHI works with communities, governments and local organizations to catalyze sustained collective action in villages facing poverty by providing communities the resources and skills they need to design and implement a development project of their choosing – this could mean planting crops, starting a local business, or anything else the community feels best serves their needs.  The foundation is the AHI’s facilitated Collective Action Process, where communities are led through weekly meetings and trainings to organize, conceptualize and implement their chosen project and receive a micro-grant to fund it. To date, we have partnered with many villages across the country with a 95% project sustainability rate. Even more exciting is the model’s proven ability to catalyze collective action that continues long after initial project completion.