1t was the year 2000, and I was attending a microfinance conference at Brandeis University.
After I gave my talk about a program in Burkina Faso that I had just evaluated, Marcia Odell, at the time the director of Pact’s Women’s Empowerment Program (WEP) in Nepal, walked up to the podium, and with a voice filled with passion told of a dramatically different approach to financial services for the poor.
Pact’s WEP initiative made it possible for small groups of village women to pool regular savings into a usefully large fund they managed themselves. They could borrow from that growing fund as they needed. A better way to save and borrow was being delivered in a simple, low-cost, replicable, and (as I was to learn later) self-replicating package. Marcia’s talk was the beginning of my journey of transformation from microcredit to microsavings, and I never looked back.I felt compelled to evaluate Marcia’s program to better understand its approach and impact. One hundred and thirty thousand women saving and borrowing in a year—how was this possible? I pulled all the networking strings I could, and with support from Pact, USAID,1 and Freedom from Hunger, I finally secured the funding I needed. I had been a consultant to Freedom from Hunger for years, and they, like me, were interested in savings. Lisa Parrott, Freedom from Hunger’s technical advisor in microfinance, also joined me in conducting an evaluation of WEP’s savings group model in Nepal. Lisa and I visited Nepal three times, devoting a year of our lives to learning about and critically understanding savings groups. I had found my calling.