Peace Through Prosperity
Helping small businesses grow where peace is fragile
Peace Through Prosperity uses agile and systems thinking to teach people who run tiny businesses in marginalised and conflict-affected communities how to run them better, and to help young people change the systems around them.
Four days of teaching, then three months of one-to-one coaching, delivered free and in the participant’s own language. More than 4,000 people since 2012, across eight countries.
In brief
What Peace Through Prosperity does
Peace Through Prosperity is a social transformation organisation running low-cost poverty alleviation programmes for micro-entrepreneurs in marginalised and conflict-affected communities. Its core programme, the mini-MBA, is four days of teaching followed by three months of one-to-one coaching, delivered free and in the participant’s own language.
Since 2012 the organisation has worked with more than 4,000 micro-entrepreneurs across eight countries: the mini-MBA in Pakistan, Yemen and Egypt, Numu and the agile workshops before it in Pakistan, Türkiye, Jordan, Angola and Ethiopia, and the Grassroots Internships in Pakistan and Tanzania. On average, participants grow their revenue by about 18% and their profitability by 85%. Every programme is open sourced once validated, so other communities can run it themselves. The work began in the street in 2011, and the whole arc is set out in our story.
How we work
Approach
We use agile, lean and design thinking to build low-cost programmes that improve livelihoods quickly. Each one starts small in the field and changes until it works. Once it works, we open source it so other communities can use it to alleviate poverty and make livelihoods more secure.
Results
Impact
What the programmes have changed for the people who take part:
Revenue and profit up by double digits
Access to finance, and financial independence
New local jobs as businesses grow
Families moving up the social ladder
Participants’ children going to mainstream schools
More self-esteem, and a stronger sense of what is right
Our micro-entrepreneurs have on average seen about 18% growth in revenue and 85% growth in profitability.
Across 32 marginalised communities we are engaged in Pakistan, Yemen and Egypt.
For individuals from within the communities we work in Pakistan and Yemen.
What we do
Our Programmes
mini-MBA
Four consecutive days, two hours a day, in cohorts of no more than twenty-five. Owner managers learn to price, plan, sell and read their own numbers through practical exercises rather than lectures, and keep the support for three months of coaching afterwards. Graduates carry on meeting each month in group workshops that cut across cohorts, which is where most of the crowd sourced problem solving happens.
Participants average about 18% revenue growth and 85% profitability growth.
Numu
A two-day bootcamp in agile and systems thinking, then twelve weeks of coaching while participants run a real change project in their own community, with no budget and nobody’s permission required. Young people learn to read the system they live in, test one small change, look honestly at what happened and go again.
Run in Pakistan, Türkiye, Jordan, Angola and Ethiopia, including inside the Baqa’a refugee camp in Jordan. Field editions run on sponsorship, and are free to the young people who take part.
We also run Accelerate, an experiment that takes design thinking and agile training remotely to tech and non-tech startups founded in marginalised communities.
What’s new
Coming up, and the latest from the field
Grassroots Internships showcase, Friday 23 October 2026
12:30 London (BST), sixty minutes, open to guests. Three teams from Pakistan and Tanzania present what they did, what changed and what did not work, then take questions.
Recent articles
- 2023 Annual Report from Pakistan – Over A Decade of Transforming Lives Across Marginalized Communities
- 18 months in Sanaa
- Social transformation – 2019 retrospective
Field notes by email
One email a month: what we ran, what changed and what did not work. No other mail, and you can unsubscribe from any of it.
Get involved
Get Involved
We believe social transformation only works when it is built from the ground up, led by people and supported by people like you, me and us. Ours is an experiment in people-led, ground-up social transformation at scale, and we would like you to join us.
Volunteer opportunities
We invite you to join our remote coaching programme. If you’re willing to commit two hours a month to coach micro-entrepreneurs, one of our coaches will teach you how, and you’ll contribute directly to the development of micro-entrepreneurs in marginalised communities.
At the moment we are looking for volunteers with Arabic and Urdu language skills to coach our participants remotely over WhatsApp, Signal or Zoom.
Make a donation
We take no grants. That keeps us independent, so the programmes are shaped by the communities that take part rather than by a funder’s conditions.
One contribution carries a micro-entrepreneur through the whole thing: four days of teaching and the three months of coaching that follow.