Photo by Susan Young

In a remote village in the Mexican state of Chiapas, 13 women gather in an open-air community space. Each has arrived at their weekly meeting with a small deposit for El Banco—“the bank”—as the women have named the savings club they’ve formed with the assistance of Trickle Up. The global nonprofit provides financial and business education, monetary investments, and coaching to women who live in extreme poverty. “We are very proud and happy to be able to save,” says Anita Aguilar Cruz, a shop owner in the community, as each peso is carefully recorded and deposited in a lockbox adorned with a sticker from the nonprofit. While the women discuss their respective micro-enterprises and how they might invest their pooled savings, Cruz’s adopted daughter plays with some children nearby.

For Trickle Up president and CEO Nathalie Laidler-Kylander (MBA 1992), who recently visited similar savings groups in India, it’s this last detail that is the sweetest: “I observed these young girls, on the periphery of the group, seeing women who are coming together to support each other. Women who are running businesses, women who are saving, women who are in leadership roles,” she emphasizes. “For these girls, that’s going to be normal.”

“This is joyful work,” says Laidler-Kylander, who joined the 43-year-old nonprofit in 2021. She considers the role to be the capstone of a “patchwork” career of moving between the for-profit sector, where she specialized in marketing, and the nonprofit sector and academia. The three areas have more in common than many think, Laidler-Kylander says. Best practices in leadership and management are applicable everywhere, but nonprofits come with additional organizational challenges. There’s often a disconnect between the user of the service and the payer, or donors—“you don’t naturally have a feedback loop”—and you have to build strategic alliances. “No nonprofit is going to achieve big objectives alone,” Laidler-Kylander explains.

Trickle Up invested in 41,000 women living in extreme poverty in Asia, Latin America, and Africa in 2021, according to the nonprofit. The organization uses an evidence-based “graduation approach” that provides two years of support to help these women build new livelihoods and micro-enterprises. This includes supporting basic needs, setting up savings groups, providing financial and business skills training and seed capital, and delivering coaching and mentoring.

It’s a process with a proven track record. In 2021, for example, the graduation approach assisted 91 percent of participants in Bangladesh become food secure, allowed participants in Burkina Faso to increase their expenditures on their children’s needs by 76 percent, and empowered 96 percent of participants in Mexico to become active decision-makers in their households. In Uganda, almost every participant reported believing in her own ability to succeed.

Historically, Trickle Up has implemented these programs in conjunction with small, local community partners. In recent years, governments and international organizations have shown a greater interest in addressing extreme poverty through investment in individuals, leading to a shift in Trickle Up’s strategy. “Our role now is shifting to be more of a capacity-building one,” explains Laidler-Kylander.

In the last four decades, Trickle Up has served 445,000 women—a life-changing experience for those individuals, their families, and their communities. (Participants in the program typically invest in areas like nutrition and education that help to interrupt the intergenerational cycle of poverty.) Globally, some 650 million people live in extreme poverty, and Laidler-Kylander and Trickle Up have set the goal of reaching 5 million people by 2030. “When we are able to leverage the infrastructure and the resources of much larger players, we can really make a dent in the problem,” Laidler-Kylander says.

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