Introducing Saving for Change and Oral Record Keeping

Not that the work was easy. Early on, many animators found that villagers were skeptical of their efforts to organize groups. “Sometimes I faced opposition,” Fatoumata Traore, one of the first animators, reflected.

Kanimba Samake, an early member and a Saving for Change volunteer responsible for training new groups in her own village, later told us about another concern. “One of the doubts I heard from other village women,” she said, “was that they were worried [that] if they would get the loan, and if they had trouble paying the loan back, that they’d be put in jail.... To convince others, I told them that Saving for Change is different from other types of [microfinance], this is our own program.”³⁰ With Saving for Change, members manage their own money, they never turn it over to the ani­mators or NGO, and the groups themselves assess whether a member is qualified for a loan and what fines to impose on late payments or default.

Member ownership required transparency. We soon found that the written record-keeping systems we had come up with were out of place in an environment in which few women could read. Written records were not transparent to the illit­erate majority. Written records would concentrate power in the hands of one or two members who could read or would force groups to depend on a literate volunteer, like a mem­ber’s husband. Sooner or later that person would dominate the discussions and decisions of the group.³¹ I had seen how written records often slow everything down. At the low lev­els of literacy and numeracy found in rural Mali, ledger entries would generate a lot of waiting time and frustration in meetings while a few people struggled over computations and other members waited for results that they only partially understood.

In Nepal, Marcia Odell’s WEP program handled illiteracy by building reading and writing education into a fundamen­tal part of the project. With a higher level of literacy, written records could work. CARE’s VSLA model was increasingly settling on passbook-style stamp cards to keep track of mem­ber savings amounts and loan payments, with considerable success.³² In the regions where we worked, only half of the men could read and write, and only 28 percent of women were literate.³³ We took the bold step of scrapping paper records altogether and developed instead an oral record-keeping sys­tem based on the members’ existing capacity to recall a lim­ited number of transactions.

Vinod took the lead designing the system. “We created a series of steps that we then changed as it was implemented, and over time it solidified,” Vinod continued. “The key was that everything had to be announced loud and clear and it needed a regimented process.”³⁴ Each person would hold up her savings contribution for all to see and then put it in the cashbox. Eventually, the women started to sit in the same spot each week, leading to the buddy system—each member just needed to remember her own information and that of her neighbor, both to verify her memory and to fill in if someone was absent. Vinod boiled down the record-keeping system to five essential pieces of information: did they make the savings payments; did they owe any fines; and, if they had a loan, how much was it for, when would it be repaid, and what was this month’s payment? “Five points to remember for yourself and for your neighbor.”

Vinod explained that “this ensured that, if the group leader left, the group wouldn’t be broken apart, because the information was extremely decentralized. It also embedded participatory group management in a way that didn’t cre­ate a new elite. This is something I saw in India—that the group leaders often got extra training, leading to the creation of a new elite within the group—and we didn’t want that to happen.

Different groups improvised methods to make oral record keeping work better. Animator Lamine Coulibaly explained that he saw groups keep pebbles in their cashbox to count the number of meetings that had taken place and to record the number of interest payments an individual had made on a loan.³⁶ A group I once visited showed me how they used shea nuts and sticks to represent loans of different sizes that had been given out, allowing the treasurer to easily keep track of both the amount of cash on hand and the portion of the group’s funds that was out on loan. Animators systematically spread these new ideas to other groups so that all could ben­efit from the inventions and innovations.

In keeping their own records, group members gained new skills and independence. Fatoumata described what a woman had told her:

Before Saving for Change, women in our village were not able to calculate and make differences, but today women are able to count money from one to one million CFA. Before Saving for Change, men didn’t believe women could go or meet with microfinance [loan officers] alone because men were afraid women wouldn’t understand the rules, or someone would steal from women. Now men are more confident that women can go to meetings, go meet an MFI to get a loan; men do not feel obliged to accompany them. Before they never let women go alone.³⁷

As time went on, Vinod and I continued to build the framework necessary to shift the locus of power in Saving for Change away from Oxfam America’s Boston headquarters and to the village groups. We set up a technical unit of our best animators and NGO supervisors, led by Paul Ahouis- soussi as regional program coordinator from the Oxfam West Africa regional office in Dakar. Fatoumata Traore, the most skilled animator from CAEB, and field coordinator Sou- maila Sogoba of Le Tonus had been working directly with groups for months. Their charisma and track records made them obvious picks for the technical unit. They fully under­stood the method, were passionately committed to it, and had credibility and respect among the other animators. Hiring from within created an internal career ladder, allowing those who excelled room to move up. We chose the next best ani­mator at Le Tonus to replace Soumaila as supervisor there. Although Vinod and I continued to give advice and over­all direction, our role moved increasingly to implementing Saving for Change in other countries. Vinod said, “I call this the backward dance.... How do you push the responsibility more and more to the people and back out of the system?”³⁸