Finance / Self-Financing

True People's Movements are self-financing.  This is our aim with Nishi.  Developing effective self-financing mechanisms is one of the challenges we aim to tackle during our initial five year development phase. 

There are two main ways to achieve this:

Initial financing: this involves either individuals or communities paying for the learning materials before they start their course or as they learn.  Ideally this would be a multiple of unit costs for cash flow and growth.  The main advantage of this is that the movement can grow quickly as there need not be a large time lag for finance being available to start in another area.  Its main disadvantage is that it is likely to exclude some of the poorest people and communities. 

Alumni: this involves alumni making a donation to the movement to finance the learning of several other learners from the increase in income that has resulted from becoming literate with Nishi.  They themselves have become literate due in part to the generosity of others, now they can be equally generous.  The main disadvantages are the time lag for donations to be made and the attrition there might be.  The advantages are that it fosters altruism, self-respect and responsibility for contributing to the welfare of others.

It is likely that combinations of both of these, and variations of them will be needed - and we do of course welcome other ideas!  While we are developing effective self-financing methods we will need external seed-funding, anyone can help with this by joining Team Literacy.