Negros Women For Tomorrow Foundation

Negros Women For Tomorrow Foundation

Negros Women For Tomorrow Foundation was founded in 1984 by Cecilia del Castillo, Corazon A. Henares, and Suzzette D. Gaston. The organization launched as a non-governmental vehicle explicitly modeled on Professor Muhammad Yunus's Grameen Bank approach, targeting women in the central Philippines who lacked access to formal credit. Henares now leads the board while Gaston serves as Executive Director, maintaining continuity with the founding team. NWTF deploys its capital exclusively through direct microfinance lending — no fund commitments, no equity positions. Its $155 million operational base (Altss estimate) supports loan products that cover working capital, housing, agriculture, and education, spanning early-stage seed loans to expansion-stage repeat borrowers. The foundation reports operating through 350 branches nationwide, confirming physical infrastructure in Isabela, Negros Occidental, and across the three major Philippine island groups. NWTF's model relies on group-lending circles that replace collateral with peer guarantees, a structural feature that keeps its portfolio concentrated in uncollateralized, short-duration credit exposure to women micro-entrepreneurs. Beyond its core lending book, NWTF holds a mixed-use investment properties portfolio and maintains a dedicated field operations fleet. The organization belongs to the Microfinance Council of the Philippines and the Impact Pioneers Network. Corazon Henares simultaneously leads Dungganon Bank, a regulated thrift bank that serves as an adjacent vehicle, creating a bridge between the foundation's non-profit charter and formal banking infrastructure. No recent operational event within the last 24 months was verifiable from available sources. NWTF's structural distinction lies in its pure Grameen replication architecture: a single foundation that runs a nationwide lending operation without a fundraising perpetual endowment model. Instead of managing a grant-funded corpus, it functions as a self-sustaining microfinance institution where retained earnings from interest income recapitalize the loan pool — a design more common in regulated microfinance banks than in Philippine foundations.