SAVING FOR CHANGE IN EL SALVADOR TODAY

It is clear that the organizers at CCR view savings groups as a means to achieve much more than economic gains for the groups’ members. They emphasize, however, that meeting material needs is a crucial foundation for further empower­ment.

Some of the members buy fishing nets wholesale and resell them; they sell propane gas to earn more. There

are many demands for credit. Many carry out their business as a group to sell things like tamales, pastries, or bread. With the extra training they received, some women have gardens Some women have used their

loans to go to school and for healthcare to buy medi­cines. The largest loan in our group was $600 for one month to help a member’s husband buy cattle to sell. With the profits, they are building a house. Often there is no money to lend out and up to now we have never had a bad experience.

Another group is making loans from $200 to $1,500. Small loans are for selling clothing, propane, and fishing nets. Some people are saving from $20 to $30 every meeting.... There are also groups that carry out small economic activities to earn money for the group fund like selling lunches. We do $0.25 to $1 raffles in the group, with the profits going to build the group fund. With just savings, the group fund does not grow very fast. For those not getting remittances, it is hard to save even $2.¹⁹

Of course, even these practical matters do not get in the way of organizing.

Sonia Aleman, on the Saving for Change technical team for CCR, described how Saving for Change has allowed members and their communities to better weather the global financial crisis, which reduced the availability of credit to poor farmers:

As the economic crisis deepens, the women are seeing their groups as an alternative. They don’t have the documentation that the government requires for its loan funds, so they are using their groups that their communities already have as an alternative. The women are lending to their husbands for agriculture. These loans charge less interest and are less bureaucratic, and no guarantees—the house, the land—are required. The problem is that our land and our houses are in the names of our husbands and we can’t get loans from the bank, so women are taking the initiative.²¹

Saving for Change created a base upon which CCR was able to expand its political strategy. Sonia explained:

We organized the groups into networks. Each group elected one representative. All the groups in a village became a network whose representatives met together every month to share what they had accomplished and the difficulties that they faced. Now we have nineteen networks of groups. In these meetings the women think about what they can do beyond savings and lending. We also train the new leaders of the groups because they restructure the leadership of the groups after they close the cycles, rotating leadership roles amongst different

women so more can gain this valuable experience.

We are creating women’s associations, and these groups are starting to establish relationships with the municipal government through formal, legal recogni­tion, in order to be able to move beyond just being an informal network. This will force the municipalities to do what they are already required to do, given that they now have a Women’s Unit and a budget earmarked for supporting women’s organizational activities. We need to put on pressure because providing this assistance to women is now not something that they are going to do because they are good people, but because it is a law that they have to follow.²²

Saving for Change provided a tool to accomplish a larger goal: grassroots political organizing. Carmen’s passion shines when she explains this key concept. “Empowering women doesn’t come out of nothing,” she told me. “It doesn’t come out of ideas; it needs to respond to the concrete material con­ditions of the women. I believe that this is the key.”²³ She continued:

Despite the handout mentality, individualism, and negative factors such as consumerism, there is always the possibility for change, and to a large degree, I think we were able to break this handout mentality as we built the power of these women. Politics is linked to eco­nomics. For them, making a small decision such as deciding when to meet made them realize that they could build power from their organization.

Some started reaching out and visiting the mayor’s office. Yes, the objective was financial, but the groups opened the political dimension. That is to say, you can’t have empowerment if you have nothing. Once you resolve the material question, empowerment is nothing magical. The savings groups built empowerment, and that enabled them to see possibilities.”²⁴