How Saving for Change Changes Lives: Personal Testimonies

In the patriarchal social and political context of Mali, solidar­ity should also be understood as an important achievement, even if we hope to one day see Saving for Change allow women to enact more significant, transformational changes in their lives and communities by taking on larger leadership and advocacy roles.

Recall the passion with which some replicating agent (RA) volunteers shared their newfound status. Bassa Diakite, an RA, explained to me why she started volunteering and described the confidence and respect that came with that choice:

I did this extra work because of the commitment I have made in front of the other women in the village. If you commit yourself to do something you have to do it.

That’s why I try to do everything I can. Even if I’m busy at home I manage to meet the deadline and go to the meeting.... My status changed when I became an RA because of the respect the women now have for me.¹⁸

In ãîþ, Oxfam America’s senior advisor for strategic alli­ances, Roanne Edwards, traveled to twenty-seven villages around Mali to visit a diverse array of Saving for Change groups that were either unusually successful or unsuccessful (i.e., groups that had dissolved).¹⁹ Among the unsuccessful groups, the overwhelming majority failed because the con­straints laid out earlier became too onerous. For example, group members did not have the support of their husbands or village leaders (seen as a critical component of success), were unable to afford their weekly contributions because they were already paying off a village pump, or succumbed to interper­sonal conflict between younger and older members.²⁰ How­ever, to put this in perspective, these failed groups are among the less than 5 percent that disbanded; the rest are still sav­ing and lending.²¹

Those groups that succeeded beyond expectations did so in part because they capitalized on Saving for Change’s strengths.

In the village of [Fabougou], for example, one Saving for Change group successfully advocated for the building of a maternity clinic with a major donor through a local NGO. Subsequently, the nine village Saving for Change groups organized themselves into teams to pump and transport water to the construction site each day. As the president of one group remarked, belonging to Saving for Change “made it very easy to constitute the work groups because we were used to working together in Saving for Change.” In the village of Banankoro, groups have worked closely with the village chief to gain access to government-run agricul­tural programs and to invest in a dynamo to provide electricity to the village for a small fee.²³

Some of the groups take on projects that will have lasting impacts on gender dynamics for generations to come. For many families in Mali, birth certificates are expensive and therefore usually purchased only for boys. With a birth certif­icate, girls would also have documentation of their age, reduc­ing the incidence of child marriage and labor and increasing their ability to succeed in school; without one, students may not be allowed to take exams. One Saving for Change village in particular took up the responsibility of acquiring birth certificates for all children of the members of the Saving for Change group, an initiative that required frequent negotia­tions with their husbands and the village chief.²⁴

Several Saving for Change groups have also taken on the responsibility to train their children to save for things like school fees, generally with small allowances provided by their parents or occasionally by earning income through com­mercial activities such as making and selling soap.

Fatoumata Traore, the former animator who now sits as lead trainer on the technical unit team in Mali, shares another story of women gaining a voice in village-wide decision mak­ing through Saving for Change:

One day a development project came to this village to get men and women to identify needs. During the meeting, men refused to invite women. But thanks to the Saving for Change group, all the women were able to be mobilized to choose one woman to go to repre­sent women in this meeting. [Beforehand], everybody discussed their needs as women in this village. After the Saving for Change meeting, they stayed to discuss: we need a garden, we need water. They identified some needs and identified a woman to go to this meeting and discuss with [the development agency]. During this meeting, the chief refused to let the woman into the meetinghouse, but this woman resisted, and eventually the chief accepted and let her tell the project agent the problems of women in the village. The agent said the woman’s suggestions were the best in the meeting. So after this, and for every meeting in the village, the chief wanted that one woman to be there to represent women’s discussions and decisions. Before Saving for Change, the women were not mobilizing together, but thanks to the savings group, they have a communication space.²⁶

Fatoumata believes strongly in the empowering potential of Saving for Change and insists that it is absolutely neces­sary that poor women take control of their own development. She tells groups she is training:

The financial partners in development in the world are tired of giving money at this time because money is not enough. There are too many problems in the world for them to give you money, so now it is time for you to mobilize your own fund. Even if the development partner wants to help you, they are more attracted to a group that mobilizes its own fund. If someone starts to build a house, it is easy to help them finalize it, but if you have another person who hasn’t started to build, she has nothing to build with, it is very difficult to help this person. It is important to build something with your own resources and capacities. If someone later wants to help you, it will be very easy for them to help you. But you need to start to build something before another can help.²⁷