From July 2005 until April 2006, I was an International Hunger Fellow for Pact's WORTH program in Cambodia. During my time visiting field projects across the Cambodian countryside, I met with program participants, collected their stories, and gathered baseline data on their financial situation before they enrolled in our program. I met this woman and her grandchildren during one of my first field visits to the Kien Svay province, and worked with my colleagues to understand her emotional history as surrogate mother for three AIDS orphans - the story of far too many women in Cambodia impacted by the high prevalence of HIV/AIDs among women. Taking a tour of the one room shack where she supports struggles to provide a safe home for her grandchildren, I was moved by her strength, despite obvious heartache and exhaustion, and tried to capture that (as well as her granddaughter's strength) in this portrait.

WORTH, first piloted in Nepal with 125,000 women, provides women the opportunity to mobilize their own loan fund through saving together, to lend to each other and collect the interest on their loans, and to grow their micro- and small businesses. Women then have access to two streams of income: one from the profits of their small businesses and one from the distributions paid out to them by the bank. WORTH now reaches over 75,000 women in Cambodia and six countries in Africa - Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.