With the project in Zimbabwe in tatters, my colleagues and I began scouting for other places where introducing Saving for Change would make sense. Several countries in West Africa met our criteria:

those with a large portion of the population living in rural areas, high rates of rural poverty, and a tradition of using groups to manage their finances. I reached out to the Oxfam America West Africa regional office in Dakar, Senegal, to develop a savings group project there.

We were offered funding from the Norway-based Stromme Foundation to launch Oxfam’s savings group program in Mali.² Mali certainly met our criteria. At that time, in 2005, 70 percent of the population lived in rural areas and 80 per­cent of the labor force earned their living through agriculture and fishing.³ We later found that 82 percent of the popula­tion where we would eventually work lived below the inter­national poverty line of $1.25 per day.⁴ Malaria was endemic. The population had tripled over the last fifty years, forcing farmers to cultivate the same land year after year, reducing crop yields.⁵ An increasingly unstable climate further threat­ened food security — some villages experienced droughts one year and floods the next.