Did Saving for Change Help to Save for More Food?
To best evaluate the results, it is important to understand the relationship between farming seasons and the availability of food in rural Mali. For poor farmers throughout much of the world, agriculture is driven by rainy seasons when crops are planted and dry seasons that allow mature crops to be harvested, dried, and stored.
In between these two natural seasons is the “lean period” of hard work before the harvest, characterized by dwindling or empty stocks of last year’s harvest and similar shortages in the local economy, which drive food prices up to unaffordable levels.6 Unfortunately, in need of cash, many farmers are forced to sell at low prices during the peak harvest season in their area and then buy food back in the lean time-often from the same traders they sold to.7Prior to the introduction of Saving for Change in the impact-evaluation area, we found that an average of 40 percent of households were food insecure. In addition, we found that after three terrible years marked by drought and political violence, the average percentage of food-insecure households in all villages had risen, but the rise was tempered in the Saving for Change villages—51 percent of households suffered food insecurity in control villages, compared with 47 percent in treatment villages. Likewise, the percentage of households suffering from chronic food insecurity (as opposed to seasonal) was also four percentage points lower (39 percent) in treatment villages than in control villages (43 percent). IPAs findings also showed that households in treatment villages were better at coping through the hungry season than households in control villages.8