Savings group is a special kind of group, with a clear, indisputable purpose to fulfill an obvious, practical need.

Savings groups encourage regular, continuing participation, and in doing so offer participants membership in a social club and the chance to engage in collective action. The practical nature of Saving for Change can become an excuse, a reason, to gather and work together.

In many ways, Saving for Change was perfectly adapted to fit the culture of rural Mali. There, many women already organize themselves in tontine groups to manage their money. Collective projects such as village gardens or work parties organized to share labor on each other’s fields are common. What would happen if instead of capitalizing on a culture in which collective action and women’s groups are common­place and strong, we used the ability of Saving for Change to create social solidarity as an end goal?

In Central America, we brought Saving for Change to communities where trust had been torn by decades of violence from civil war, drug trafficking, and gangs, and where social norms meant that many women remained clois­tered in their homes. The pull of regular meetings could, in certain circumstances, become even more important than the underlying motive of financial management. Even in these instances, the usefulness of a safe place to save and the draw of credit continued to motivate and justify those meetings. We saw both the outcome and the mechanism work together to improve people’s lives. In Central America, we began an experiment in places where a lack of social solidarity itself was a major challenge.