Who Joins Saving for Change Groups?

IPA found that women who joined Saving for Change were generally older and better connected socially in their village, although groups that formed later included women who were more socially marginalized.⁴ Importantly, while it is true that women who are slightly better off are more likely to join Sav­ing for Change, women in the lowest third household-wealth bracket (as measured by per capita food consumption) still joined in substantial numbers: 42 percent of the top third of households join compared with 33 percent of households in the bottom third.⁵ Saving for Change is reaching, on aver­age, a third of a village’s poorest women, something that usu­ally takes special targeted programming, a costly outreach effort, and extra training or support, and even then it is rarely achieved.

My strategy since I first designed the program was that the poorest could be reached not by targeting them but by saturating the village with Saving for Change groups. If most women were part of groups, then by definition the poorest would be included. I also knew that the slightly better off would join first because the poorest couldn’t take the risk that their savings might not be safe—they were living too close to the margin of survival.