After rapid growth, US nonprofit seeks African CEO for its next chapter

For 15 years, Dianne Calvi has been at the helm of Village Enterprise — a nonprofit focused on ending extreme poverty in Africa. During that time, she has helped the organization transform: by 2024, Village Enterprise’s $1 million budget had grown to $20 million, while its workforce had gone from 13 people to nearly 500. But in 2025, Village Enterprise — like nearly every organization in the aid sector — faced a turning point. It had lost a quarter of its budget due to USAID cuts. It was forced to lay off 100 staff. And it launched a “strategic response fund” to help the organization fill the gaps. Now more than ever, Calvi said, Village Enterprise needed to make a long-anticipated change: hiring an African chief executive officer to take the organization forward. “It’s a really difficult time, and it’s a painful time,” said Calvi, who announced that she would be stepping down from her role last month. “But we are also an organization that, over time, and with African leadership, will look back and say: that was a really important transition because of what happened. That was the right time to do it.” The move isn’t just symbolic, Calvi added. It’s central to how Village Enterprise operates. The organization helps rural Africans escape extreme poverty by providing seed capital, business training, and mentorship to launch small, sustainable businesses — rigorously measuring its impact through randomized controlled trials. But critically, those programs have long been driven by those closest to target communities, despite having a California headquarters. Today, the organization's leadership team includes 16 Africans and seven Americans, and its staff in Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda far outnumber those in the United States. With the vast majority of staff being community-based business mentors, 94% of Village Enterprise’s team is African. Over the past 15 years, Calvi said she’s seen those leaders build the kinds of relationships — with governments, communities, and local leaders — that are essential to the organization’s success. And as foreign aid becomes increasingly volatile, she added, local grounding is more important than ever. “Because of what’s going on in the international development sector — and the need for African governments to really step up — having leaders who are African will make that much easier,” Calvi said. Calvi will stay on as CEO until that position is filled, and support the organization through an advisory role once that happens. But for now, the role is open — and Village Enterprise is looking for someone “bold,” “courageous” (and preferably based in Nairobi) to take charge. The last 15 years of Village Enterprise When Calvi first arrived at Village Enterprise, the organization looked nearly nothing like it does today. There were six staff members in Africa and seven in the United States, and all of Village Enterprise’s business mentors — the core of the organization’s approach — were volunteers. That was the first thing that had to change, Calvi said. These volunteers delivered the training, mentoring, and cash transfers critical to the organization’s model — and as a result, they needed to be paid. “Leadership has to be centered here, and it has to be driven here. Unless that happens, it’s going to be hard to expedite what happens on this continent.” --— Winnie Auma, chief operating officer, Village Enterprise “They’re the engine of the organization,” she said. “To deliver consistent impact, you need to have people you’re really training, and recruiting, and retaining over many years.” The second thing that had to change, Calvi said, was the leadership — all of whom were American, and all but one of whom was based in the United States. It felt like an “outdated NGO model,” Calvi said. As a result, Calvi began pushing to transition some business mentors to higher, paid positions within the organization’s staff. One of those business mentors was the current chief operating officer, Winnie Auma, who joined the organization just eight months before Calvi. The first time Auma met Calvi, she said the new CEO asked her — then a volunteer — how Auma would like to see the organization and program evolve, and what direction they should be taking. “I remember being a business mentor and having an audience, even back then, with a CEO, with board members, with potential donors — and sitting and co-designing the strategy, and co-designing the program,” said Auma, speaking to Devex 15 years later. From then until now, Auma rose the ranks at the organization, going from a volunteer to a field coordinator to assistant country director to country director — and then, to vice president of programs, chief program officer, and chief operating officer today. “Leadership has to be centered here, and it has to be driven here,” said Auma. “Unless that happens, it’s going to be hard to expedite what happens on this continent.” The next thing that had to change, Calvi said, was Village Enterprise’s evidence base. For months, Calvi studied the organization’s approach, ultimately honing a group-based, one-year “poverty graduation model” as Village Enterprise’s core offering. By 2013, it had begun its first independent, randomized control trial in Uganda. By 2014, it had been awarded its first grant by the U.S. Agency for International Development. And by 2018, the results of that first control trial were in: Village Enterprise’s full entrepreneurship program increased asset holdings, consumption, well-being, and nutrition, according to independent researchers. Those results led the organization to implement the world’s first development impact bond on poverty alleviation, which repaid investors with interest once Village Enterprise met its outcome targets. Ultimately, that bond supported 14,000 first-time entrepreneurs in three years. “Recently, I connected with an entrepreneur I remembered from early on — she had started in her community doing agriculture, and then she went into tailoring,” said Auma. “Today, she’s a finance minister for Soroti city.” For years, the organization was on an upward trajectory. Its budget continued to grow, and by 2021, another study showed that for every $1 invested in a community, over $5 of new income was generated by entrepreneurs. That got the attention of governments in the organization’s target countries, Calvi said — and the interest was mutual. “How can we scale this cost-effective, evidence-based model across Africa?” said Calvi. “We believe the path to doing that is with government.” The next 15 years — and beyond For Village Enterprise, the focus on governments has never been more critical. Earlier this year, the organization was affected by the collapse of USAID, with Calvi telling Devex that in January and February, Village Enterprise lost $10 million of USAID funding over three years. That came out to a loss of about 25% of the organization’s budget, she said — but in the months since, the staff have been largely able to fill the gap. They raised $1.5 million from individual donors and secured a large grant from the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. Ultimately, this year’s budget will look a lot like last year’s, Calvi said, though lower than her projected target of $24 million for 2025. Still, that doesn’t mean there weren’t losses. Village Enterprise and Catholic Relief Services had been teaming up to tackle child malnutrition in Kenya, with the former organization’s entrepreneurial model helping families sustainably address the issue, supplemented by nutrition training and other programming. It was one of Village Enterprise’s largest programs, with the organization training nearly 18,000 entrepreneurs since October 2019. Last year, the program reduced child malnutrition from 36% to 4% among the entrepreneurs’ families, amounting to nearly 25,000 children total — and this year, that program was canceled. “It was such a successful program in terms of reducing child malnutrition, and there was really good data behind it,” said Calvi. “We had already secured a similar project in Madagascar, and we had a couple more in the pipeline … and in those cases, what is really sad, is now we’re going to have to go back to giving people food aid.” For both Calvi and Auma, that’s yet another reason why African leadership is needed — urgently. African governments have structures and money through tax systems, Calvi said, along with an incentive to step up to the plate. And both feel that with an African CEO, Village Enterprise could more easily attract support from those governments. So, who are they looking for? A “visionary leader,” Calvi said, who is “bold and courageous.” Someone who is not scared of the organization’s ambitious goal — lifting 20 million people out of extreme poverty by 2030. A good listener, she added, and someone who can learn from those who are already at the organization. And an innovator, as well as someone who still values Village Enterprise’s community-based approach. “We are at a moment in history where we need to be focusing on evidence-based, cost-effective models,” Auma added. “As an African continent, this is the moment for our leadership.”