The Buzz Women's scale journey - growth, replication and depth

Buzz Women’s mentor Ousman Cham says “We count the number of women only to know how many women have started counting on themselves”

In 2012, we gave ourselves the goal of reaching 20,000 women by 2020. It seemed like a big goal at that time and sounded rhythmic. We ended up reaching 20,000 women in 2017, because we found the support we required from all the stakeholders involved. Then the outreach target went from 100,000 to 1 million to 10 million over the years. We set these goals for ourselves as women gave us confidence to reach out more and dream bigger.?

At Buzz Women, our journey of growth, scale and depth has been both organic and intentional, driven by the knowledge that we are too small and the need is too large and by the courage showcased by the women to change the systems around them. It isn’t just about expanding Buzz Women; it’s about amplifying our vision of enabling women to use their voice to craft their lives and lead change in their communities.

We believe that for scale to be adapted by others and for the depth of impact to be taken seriously, the growth has to be at a certain critical mass. We decided to use the saturation approach of going to every village in the geography, so that there is scaffolding from a faction to prevent the suppression of the emerging new system. Rather than one woman being enabled to be a leader, we enabled her to support and catalyse other women like her so that they unite to shape the emergent system collectively. In the initial days the approach to growth was only through the growth of the organisation until we made our projections and realised we cannot do it as an organisation. So the additional approach to what was already being done by reaching 10%-20% of women in a village was to nurture the community anchor woman to enable other women and bring them in as part of the scaffolding. This is the only way the growth of the Buzz movement can and will be sustainable.

Like our last article which busted the myth about village women volunteering,here, another myth got busted - the quality of intervention and impact will go down if not delivered by the organisations trainers. How do we know this? In the last 2 years, 20,000 women have been trained by the community anchors and our impact assessment report shows that the changes in knowledge, skills and attitudes of women towards financial literacy is at par or even better than when the women are trained by the Buzz trainers.?

It is not about the growth of the INSTITUTION, but the growth of the IDEA that women can craft their own lives using their inner power. This implies that Buzz is transforming from an NGO into a movement, owned and operated by thousands of women around the world. And that we are mere catalysts in that.We will reach 10 million women, maybe globally or maybe just in Karnataka. We are keeping it open for the women to decide how fast and far the growth should be. We will reach less than 20% of that number directly and the rest will be reached by the community anchor women - they’ll create a powerful ripple of change!