The Trickle Up programme was started in 1979 with a $1,000 budget by Mildred Robbins Leet and Glen Leet. The money was used to create ten different businesses in Dominica in order to help to reduce poverty and unemployment.
Since then, the Trickle Up programme (co-ordinated through its 3,000 volunteer agencies) claims to have helped over 250,000 people in 108 countries to create or expand over 36,000 businesses.
Businesses can include anything from bee-keeping, doll-making and raising pigs and chickens, to making and selling cement blocks or bread.
According to the programme's founders, the greatest resource for reducing global poverty is the fastest growing segment of the population, the one billion people who constitute the 'poorest of the poor'. The poor can invest their own human energy for economic and human development, but only after a shift in thinking which puts capital in the hands of the poor themselves, instead of relying on traditional 'trickle down' development programmes.
Trickle Up Programme, 54 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10024-6509, USA (tel 212 362 7958; fax 212 877 74674).
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