Participatory Design and Training

Meanwhile, the project’s design was underway across the Atlantic at Oxfam America’s headquarters in Boston, Mas­sachusetts, and in Davis, California, where Freedom from Hunger is based.

The curriculum design team reviewed a pile of manuals, including those from Freedom from Hunger's Credit with Education program, Pact's WEP, and India's self-help groups, and the savings group manuals developed by the now-CEO of VSL Associates, Hugh Allen, for CARE's widespread VSLA program, which had by then become the standard savings group model. While drawing heavily from the existing how­to guides, we decided to try something different. “We wanted to develop our own in-house capacity to do it ourselves,” explained Vinod. With our own manual, we could create “a self-reinforcing learning loop,” he said, “where we were constantly updating our manuals based on what we learned from the field, so they never got stagnant.”²² For Vinod, the process was as important as the result, a principle that would become core to every aspect of Saving for Change.

marc bavois, an expert on training savings groups, worked at Freedom from Hunger when Saving for Change was just starting. In explaining this active approach to curriculum design, he said that the ultimate goal was for each group “to have a genuine, participatory discussion to come to the group’s decisions,” such as the savings rate or loan condi­tions.²³ Organizing a group that becomes “a unique institu­tion that is making its own decisions” requires members to engage in “genuine reflection” about their own rules, instead of just copying the interest rates or late fees that work for another group.²⁴ Development scholar and senior lecturer in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences at the Univer­sity of Bath, Dr. Sarah White, explains that participation in design profoundly changes people’s experience of a program. Participation “is both a means to empowerment and an end in itself [that] transforms people’s reality and their sense of it.”²⁵ When everyone understands how the group works and why, its mechanics become transparent and leaders become accountable to members. It is much harder for someone with wealth, education, or social status to co-opt the group’s resources for his or her own, what we call “elite capture.”²⁶

To put the plan into action, the Saving for Change team organized a three-week workshop to train the first set of ani­mators —the staff of our local NGO partners who would organize groups. We needed to ensure that the animators understood the participatory engagement at the heart of Saving for Change—training the animators had to follow that same practical, “learning conversation” style so that the animators too felt ownership over the core principles of the training process. The animators also functioned as a critical bridge between international funders (like us) and project managers and the poor, rural women who would eventually call the shots.²7Animators would need to have the cultural expertise to navigate the complex internal power dynamics of their villages and groups, ensuring that everyone could understand and engage on equal terms.

As the training progressed, the trainees were sent out to put into practice the lessons they had learned the day before as they formed groups in nearby villages. This practice helped develop each animator’s skills while their feedback informed the program design. “It is a principle of adult learning to be able to immediately apply the learning,” explained Vinod. “So as we trained the animators, we were gathering input and making real-time adjustments.”²⁸

After three weeks of training in January 2005, the anima­tors were ready to start work on their own. When I returned to evaluate the program that August, I was enormously relieved to find there were already 216 groups with five thou­sand members in place in just seven short months. We were ecstatic.