Rise

A Ghanaian woman wearing a blue and red patterned shirt leans against a table holding a food processor machine.
Economic Growth

Women are building viable businesses. Too few can access the finance to grow them.

About 700 million women worldwide don’t have a bank or mobile money account (World Bank, 2025). Many run shops, farms, and market stalls. What they lack is a safe place to save, a record lenders can see, reliable access to markets, and loans that fit how their businesses earn and grow.

Rise expands access to CARE savings groups,  strengthening women’s ability to save, build assets and act together, then connects savings group members and other entrepreneurs to finance and markets. At the same time, it helps banks, companies, and investors reach customers and enterprises they have often overlooked.

Rise is making three important shifts:

  1. More women saving, building assets and using the strength of the group to create opportunities together
  2. More entrepreneurs accessing finance and markets, with stronger businesses and clearer pathways to lenders and buyers
  3. More financial institutions finding better ways to reach and finance women and small businesses that have traditionally been underserved

CARE helps:

  • Build and strengthen savings groups and other member owned groups so women can save, build assets, and act together
  • Prepare groups and entrepreneurs for finance and markets, including stronger businesses and better financial records
  • Connect entrepreneurs to lenders, buyers, and supply chains across sectors, including through cooperatives and other business groups where useful
  • Work with financial institutions to design products and ways of serving customers that fit how women and small businesses actually earn and repay
  • Use temporary incentives, guarantees, or other risk sharing where needed so partners can test new customer segments and build models that can continue commercially

The evidence is encouraging

Financial institutions keep their own underwriting, pricing, and credit decisions. And it’s a strong market: across 153 International Finance Corporation (IFC) client institutions in emerging and developing markets, women-owned businesses had lower nonperforming loan rates than the average small business (IFC, 2025).

Savings groups also create a strong foundation. Members save about a third more, more women get loans, and the businesses they run started to earn more (Karlan et al., 2017)

Rise's goals

62M

savings group members by 2030, with 80% women, up from 30 million

$3B

annual savings across the network by 2030, up from $1.3 billion

$1B+

commercial lending Rise plans to unlock by 2030

2M

jobs created through enterprise growth by 2030

Learn more about Rise’s projects:

Three women wearing bright green uniforms smile in a kitchen.

Tanzania: From Farm to Finished Product

CARE helped women organize from savings groups into a cooperative that owns 99% of a tea processing factory. Moving from raw green leaf into processing raised farmer income by roughly 500%, while a new auction lifted the official green leaf price by 17%.

Read the full story

A group of women from Sierra Leone stand in a line together outside of a small building.

Sierra Leone: Proof, Then Credit

A first-loss risk-sharing facility brought Salone Microfinance Trust into lending to 8,000 savings group women it had not served before. Repayment reached 99%, and half of first-loan borrowers went on to take a second loan without the guarantee.

Watch the video

Read the full story

A Pakistani woman sifts through brightly colored clothes hanging on a rack

Peru, Pakistan, and Vietnam: $15 Million In, $1 Billion Out

CARE’s women-centered finance work with Mastercard has helped turn about $15 million in philanthropic investment into $1 billion in lending by helping financial institutions design products around how women entrepreneurs run their businesses.

Learn more about Strive Women