LAUNCHING SAVING FOR CHANGE IN CHALATENANGO

We began in Chalatenango, as always, with a feasibility study to explain the concept, gauge interest, and perhaps mod­ify the model to fit local needs. As we explained Saving for Change to various groups of women, they listened politely and then calmly explained to us that they were too poor to save.

El Salvador had no savings or ROSCA tradition such as the tontines in Mali.⁴ Some of the resistance to the idea of saving money was rooted in the economic structure in Cha- latenango, where cash is not the most important form of income. The vast majority of ChalatenangoS families worked on small family farms raising corn and beans, supplemented by remittances from relatives working abroad and a few small businesses—making tamales or the ubiquitous Salvadorian treatpupusas (tortillas stuffed with cheese).

Our interviewees, all of them women, also told us that they were afraid. El Salvador has the second highest murder rate in the world.⁵ So prevalent are violence and crime that women suggested that by pooling money they would be put­ting not just their savings, but also their lives, at risk.⁶ They were skeptical of the idea of collecting all their money in one place, even if the Saving for Change model encouraged loan­ing that money right back out.

Despite the negative feedback, some promising organi­zations were interested in launching Ahorro Comunitario: Association of Communities for Development in Chalat- enango (Coordinadora de Comunidades para el Desarrollo de Chalatenango, CCR) and Caritas.⁷ CCR is a member­run community organization pairing political mobilization with service delivery, with programs ranging from environ­mental advocacy to providing water and electricity.⁸ CCR is the largest organization in Chalatenango.

Given the enthusiasm of these strong local organizations, my own pull toward the region, and the availability of fund­ing, we decided to launch a small pilot project to test the pro­gram in this challenging context. Oxfam America’s program officer, Milagro Maravilla, took on the role of coordinating Saving for Change in El Salvador. If you know a bit of Span­ish, you know that Milagro Maravilla’s name translates into English as “marvelous miracle.” It seemed we would need such a miracle to be successful in Chalatenango. Luckily, we had one.

Cecilia (Ceci) Ramirez of Caritas and Esperanza Ortega from CCR were hired by Milagro to become the first promo- toras (trainers). Both were respected leaders in their commu­nities for many years. Cecilia’s background was in teaching adult literacy skills, and even though she had only a ninth­grade education, she wanted to share what she knew.¹¹ Mean­while, as a young woman during the civil war, Esperanza of CCR had returned from a refugee camp in Honduras to join the guerillas in El Salvador, and ever since then she had remained committed to struggling for social justice for her community.¹² Once Esperanza and Ceci had organized and trained a few groups—with great effort—that initial success was sufficient to secure more funding, and another ten pro- motoras were hired.

Oxfam America hired Carmen Fabian Guardado to over­see the project. In her early forties at the time she joined Saving for Change, she too came from a postwar organizing background, having joined CCR as a teenager to help resettle refugees after the civil war. Despite her experience working with local community members, she found that promoting Saving for Change was a challenge. She told me the follow­ing story, which encapsulates how difficult it was to launch the program:

I went with Ceci to a community called Pacayas, and we were happy because thirty women showed up at the meeting...... As we presented the program, we noticed

that the women were leaving one by one. Finally, there were only a few women left and Ceci began to laugh, and I told her that we could still work with them. Then she told me that those few remaining women were there to close up the church.¹³

Women complained that Saving for Change offered noth­ing but training, when most NGOs donated free services or goods. They raised concerns that this project might be a scam (of which they had seen plenty before) or that mem­bers would not pay back their loans and that the staff would steal the money. Carmen quipped “We should have had a banner that said, ‘No one other than you is going to touch your money!’”¹⁴

Despite the initial skepticism of some of the women, five years later our initial optimism that people would join these groups was warranted. Today in El Salvador there are more than four hundred groups in place with 8,584 members.¹⁵ Groups that were saving little are now saving much more, and some groups are lending out every penny in their group fund. The leaders of some groups are training new groups on their own. Even when funding for the team of twelvepro­motoras ended after three years, according to Milagro, “The promotoras continued supporting the groups that they had trained earlier as volunteers.”¹⁶ Today, the president of CCR is one of the former promotoras of Saving for Change. While we saw a quick launch of Saving for Change in Mali, it took five years of intensive work, and double or triple the invest­ment per group, to launch the program in Chalatenango. The same outcome, but it took longer.