Eighty-Five Women, Twelve Months Later

Grant programmes are easy to celebrate on graduation day and hard to evaluate a year later. We went back to all eighty-five women.

Seventy-one are still trading. Forty-six have hired at least one person. Fourteen have closed or paused, most often because of a household health emergency — which tells us that livelihood support and healthcare access are not separate programmes at all.

The next cohort adds a small health contingency to each grant. That change came directly from this review.