Courtenay Cabot Venton is an international development economist and founder of The Share Trust. By demonstrating the relative returns of social and environmental interventions, she creates an evidence base for what works and what doesn ’t when it comes to reducing poverty worldwide.
As an independent consultant, Courtenay provides research and advice to donors and NGOs on the economics of development. She works extensively with agencies such as the UN, the UK Department for International Development (DFID), and the World Bank, as well as non profits such as Oxfam, Plan International, Tearfund and others. Courtenay has worked across South America, Asia and Africa. Courtenay has a Masters from Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute. She sits on the board of World Connect, a non profit that funds grassroots projects for women and girls across the globe.
Courtenay was named as one of Town & Country’s Top 50 Philanthropists in their June 2017 issue, and was invited to speak at their Philanthropy Summit in NYC to convince world powers that investment in avoiding humanitarian crises is not only humane, its good business.
The Share Trust was founded by Courtenay and partners to support and strengthen Self Help Groups in a holistic way. They engage across the broader ecosystem to better address the systemic barriers and opportunities grassroots initiatives face.
A fundamental belief in the ability of people, working collectively, to revolutionize their communities.
Women’s collectives – or Self Help Groups – are a global phenomenon that have existed in many forms throughout space and time. These networks provide individual benefits – self-esteem, agency and confidence – as well as a platform for collective action. These groups ignite a spark: as women meet together, they work together, and as they work together, they build hope for themselves and for their communities. With the power of hope in their hands, women collectively design and create the change they want to see.
Self Help Groups are voluntary groups, typically comprised of 10-25 people who meet every week to save, start small business activities, and create change both for themselves and their communities. SHGs are created with the underlying assumption that when individuals join together to take action toward overcoming obstacles and attaining social change, the result can be individual and/or collective empowerment. Empowerment, in turn, creates the bedrock for a wide range of positive outcomes, many of which provide the enabling environment for good governance, political change, and economic growth. As groups grow in maturity, SHG members begin to facilitate new groups, replicating organically and exponentially. Thematic content for groups can extend well beyond savings and business skills, with topics ranging from health practices to disaster risk prevention to human rights.
In 2013, Courtenay Cabot Venton was asked to evaluate a Self Help Group model in Ethiopia. As an international development economist who has spent decades helping donors, governments and organizations to identify programs that have the biggest impact on reducing poverty around the world, she was blown away by the changes that these women’s groups were making in their communities – setting up schools, starting small businesses, advocating for access to services, and stopping childhood marriage. She founded the Share Trust in 2018 because she saw a mounting interest in the ability of SHGs to create transformational change in their communities, and she wanted to support the ecosystem of organizations working in this space by building the evidence base and facilitating collaborations between like-minded actors, influencing both policy and programming to amplify the approach.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Courtenay was asked to lead a team of experts advising on the UK government’s global COVID-19 response. This led her to experience firsthand that while millions of dollars of emergency funding were coming online, very little was going to local and national organizations on the ground because international systems were poorly equipped to support these community-led responses. She joined forces with Chilande Kuloba Warria from the Warande Advisory Centre in Kenya and Brendan Cullen, founding member of Co-Impact, to strategize how to structure a community based response that could also receive substantial government funding. Together they developed the Local Coalition Accelerator to build bridges between bilateral funders and coalitions of local actors – with SHGs and community based structures at their core.
This partnership broadened the Share Trust’s mission to more holistically support and strengthen the SHG ecosystem globally, taking into account the systemic barriers and opportunities these groups face to more effectively scale community driven collective action.