For nearly two decades, Shanta’s model has depended on our own program staff walking villages through the same six-year path: form a Village Development Team, build a Community Bank, and grow toward independence. This year, for the first time, we handed that role to someone else, four Village Development Team members from villages that already graduated from our program are now doing the facilitating themselves.
This is a pilot in the truest sense: our first live test of whether the model can spread from village to village without a Shanta staff member in the middle. Two brand-new villages, Kyauk Tan and Min Ma Hti, are right now mid-way through their own Community Bank launch, guided entirely by peers who’ve already walked the same path.
What makes this different: neither Kyauk Tan nor Min Ma Hti has ever been a Shanta partner village. The facilitation, the Community Bank training, and the ongoing monitoring are all being carried out by four peers, graduates teaching graduates-to-be.
If this works, it changes what’s possible for Shanta’s model. Instead of Shanta staff carrying every new village through its own six-year path, graduated villages could carry the next ones, spreading the work further, faster, and at lower cost, without losing what makes it effective. It’s early. But the first loan cycle is running in both villages, and we’ll be watching closely to see what peer-led facilitation can do that we couldn’t do alone.