Savings Groups as Platforms for Innovation

Just as these principles can be used to design a variety of community-based development projects, savings groups them­selves can serve as effective platforms for development and empowerment initiatives.

For example, in 2006, Freedom from Hunger launched its Microfinance and Health Protection Program, in which women who participate in savings groups discuss relevant health issues like breastfeeding, family planning, and child nutrition in addition to learning wealth-management skills. In India, the program goes beyond health education to provide access to preventative healthcare. If a doctor detects a prob­lem, the women have access to health loans, health savings, and health microinsurance to help pay for the treatment.⁵

In Uganda, the Aga Khan Foundation has used savings groups as platforms to market solar lighting, which for rural

138 In Their Own Hands communities has various health and cost benefits compared with traditional kerosene lamps.⁶ Just as these villages are too rural for traditional financial institutions, they are often too rural to be part of a formal power grid. The program uses the savings groups’ knowledge and elevated status in local com­munities to provide a simple solution to a widespread problem.

Another example of using savings groups as a platform for other types of development is a soil-fertility program that I helped introduce in Mali. In 2011, I contacted Roland Bunch, who built his reputation by rebuilding exhausted soils in Honduras and Guatemala,⁷ and asked him to come to Mali.

Over a few days, Bunch and I developed an agricultural intervention that built on the Saving for Change groups already in place. It was, like the savings groups, scalable, sim­ple, locally controlled, and self-replicating. Each aspect of the design reflected the principles that made savings groups successful:

• A vision of scale and self-replication This was a project not only for a handful of villages but for the entire Sahel. By encouraging the spread of ideas through peer exchanges, what was learned in one hundred villages will serve as a learning laboratory to bring these services to thousands of villages over the next years.

• Less is more, and the simpler the better The project built soil fertility by introducing plants and trees that nourish the soil and require minimum labor. It was simple enough that it could be introduced by trainers who are not agronomists.

• Build on what is already in place The project used skills and tools that community members already had, such as knowledge of intercropping. The focus was on growing food for subsistence because, as once stated by John Ambler while at Oxfam America, “the first market is the stomach.”

• Be sustainable The project introduced techniques that did not require purchased inputs such as seeds or inorganic fertilizer.

• Keep costs low No specialized tools, chemical fer­tilizers, or other agricultural inputs were required for the project.

• No giveaways Even seeds needed to be purchased.

• Insist on local control Roland introduced the pro­gram through women’s Saving for Change groups and then got out of the way.

• Establish high performance standards and insist on meeting these standards Each animator was assigned a cluster of villages and held accountable for their performance.

• Embrace learning and innovation Weincludedcon- stant evaluation as a part of the project, with an eye to building to scale and disseminating outcomes. Also, turning over complete control to the groups allows them to adapt the program over time to better fit their needs.

This initiative with smallholder farmers in Mali addressed several issues: It helped rebuild soil fertility, provide food and fodder, increase agricultural production, and raise the water table by helping to have more water percolate into the soil. As the trees were trimmed so that they did not provide too much shade, the cuttings also provided firewood for cooking. These outcomes may seem small to higher-income urban dwell­ers in the global North. However, for subsistence farmers in poor, rural societies, these improvements not only increase their incomes but also help preserve their livelihoods for the next generation and make them significantly more resilient to shocks from conflict, climate change, and drought.

While projects aimed at increasing financial inclusion and improving soil fertility may seem to have little in com­mon, both savings groups and this agricultural intervention worked from the same basic development principles. The savings group was used as a platform to organize community members to address a pressing problem felt not just by them but the entire region.

The organic spread of good ideas is the most efficient, sustainable way to create change in any sector. As I have said

Applying Savings Groups Principles to Other Initiatives 141 throughout my work, “They know how.” The same way tra­ditional ROSCAs spread throughout villages, peer-to-peer networks have been effective at spreading knowledge on how to treat fevers, to make soap, to exclusively breastfeed, to take antiretroviral drugs for combating HIV, and to intercrop to boost agricultural productivity.

Empowering individuals and communities to take devel­opment into their own hands is the most efficient and effec­tive way to create large-scale, durable change in the poorest and most remote communities in the world. Using this model for savings groups, I have seen the positive effects spread far beyond financial inclusion.