One Hundred Thousand Naira

She was already doing the hard part long before we came into the picture. Up before the sun, stock sorted, at her spot every single school day without fail. This is not a woman who needed talking into working.

The effort was never the issue. The issue was that all that effort was only bringing in about ₦400 a week.

And that ₦400 was carrying four boys. It had to feed them, keep them in school, and hold the whole house together in a face-me-I-face-you where the rent and the light bill and the school fees all showed up with their hands out, and there was nobody else’s income coming in behind hers. Then her first son got into 100 level and there was accommodation to sort, and honestly, what is ₦400 a week going to do in front of that?

That’s the thing that got me, when I sat with it. Here is a woman working herself thin every day, and it still wasn’t enough to comfortably feed and school her own children. She hadn’t done anything wrong. The margin was just too small to live on, full stop.

So we gave her ₦100,000. Not to eat for a week. To buy more, sell more, and stretch out that tiny margin she’d been surviving on.

And it did help, her profit went up, which when you’ve been managing on ₦400 a week is genuinely something. But let me be straight with you, because we try to always be straight: this is a start, not a finish. The bigger margin makes the weeks easier. It hasn’t magically covered everything four growing boys need at once, the fees, the accommodation, all of it landing together. Where we want to get her is further than this. Enough margin that she can pay her sons’ school fees herself, comfortably, from her own trade, and stop merely surviving.

Look at what she’s already done with a small push. That’s what makes me want to see her with a proper one.

Now, the honest state of things. Mrs. Esther is one of our first. We’re small, we’re mostly unfunded, and there are widows I’m quietly carrying myself right now because there isn’t a real fund yet to carry them the way they deserve. I’d love to sit here and tell you we’ve done this a hundred times. We haven’t. Not yet.

But she is the proof. Put a modest amount directly into the hands of a woman who is already working, and it doesn’t vanish, it grows, into more stock, more profit, four boys who eat and stay in school. Mrs. Florence is proof too. Her children stayed in school because we paid the fees when nobody else was going to. With very little, we’ve shown the thing actually works. What we’re chasing now is the means to keep doing it, again and again, until Mrs. Esther’s name is just near the top of a very long list.

She did the hard part all along. We just widened the margin.

💚 ONE THING TO REMEMBER
A hardworking widow doesn’t need rescuing. She needs a margin wide enough to let her own effort pay.

With you in it,
Grace
Gritty Widows Foundation