CHAPTER 2

A Group Meeting

The following tale of a savings group meeting is a sketch drawn from many sources. The village Kouloukoura and its economy, environment, and social structures were crafted from a composite of villages in its region that have been closely studied by Oxfam America, Freedom from Hunger, Innovations for Poverty Action, and the University of Arizona’s Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology. The characters featured here are themselves composite sketches, drawn from case studies of and interviews with savings group members and data that indicates what a typical group in this area may look like, including its members’ livelihoods, family structures, and finances.

Kouloukoura

Bintou was thinking about rain as she wiped sweat off her forehead and put down the short hoe she used for weeding. Hours before noon, the day was already hot. Bintou lives in Kouloukoura, Mali, a midsize village of a few thousand people located in Mali’s expansive Koulikoro region. The region is tucked below the Sahara desert to the north, where agriculture gives way to cattle herding. Kouloukoura, like many of Mali’s villages south of the desert, receives enough rainfall for villagers to cultivate many crops; the size of the harvest, though, is extremely vulnerable to the impacts of seasonal rains and drought.

Bintou was eager to cut short her time in the field to attend her Saving for Change meeting, even if it meant for-going an hour or two of work she could do before the sun got unbearable. She hadn’t seen some of the women in her group since the last meeting and was excited for the chance to catch up. She made one last sweeping glance over her fruiting tomato plants before bending down to hoist a wicker basket onto her head, overflowing with peanuts she’d brought out of storage earlier that morning. She walked briskly down a well-trampled path of off-white, hard sand, glancing across the small cornfields and tight stands of trees near her home.

As she walked, Bintou poked her head in the entryways of neighbors busy inside the low walls of their household yards. Each wall surrounded an open-air living space bordered by a few mud houses with thatched or tin roofs, round thatched granaries, and shoulder-high, open-roofed latrines and bathing rooms. Some of the yards had small gardens like Bintou’s within their walls or just outside. Most were bustling with little kids and three generations of women cooking over pots perched on stones, over coals fueled by firewood the women had collected earlier. Other women pounded millet in big wooden mortars with heavy four-foot-long pestles. In one yard, two teenagers were throwing the pestles into the air and seeing how many times they could clap their hands before catching the mortar as it fell. The rhythmic knock of the mortar provided a steady beat under everyone else’s movements.

At this time of morning, most men were out tending their corn and millet fields, while the women were up and about, finishing chores before heading out to the fields to join their husbands. Of course, they still had time to pause and ask after Bintou’s health and that of her family as she went by.

A Savings Group Meeting

Bintou was one of the last to arrive at the mango tree where the meeting was held, so she quickly found her place in the circle of twenty-one women and sat down among the group, emptying the basket of peanuts in front of her. Some other women in the group were also shelling peanuts, while others held their young children. Everyone sat on pagnes, colorful, multifunctional cloth wraps that serve as skirts and wraparound baby carriers. Bintou leaned over to grasp hands and say hello to her friends and then pulled a handful of peanuts out of the pile and began to shell them, dropping the raw, hulled nuts back into her basket.

The group was sitting in the center of the village, the mango tree casting just enough shade to make the meeting pleasant as the hot morning sun climbed into the sky. With everyone settled, Aminata, the group’s president, raised her voice to ask the first question. “Is everyone here?” she said in Bambara, the dominant language in the region, turning to the person on her right. Each woman made the same motion, confirming that the person who always sat next to her was indeed there. “What is our group called?” she sang out. The group replied, “Benkadi,” meaning solidarity.¹ Aminata continued through the group’s opening process, a ritual that laid out the agreed-upon ground rules and expectations at every meeting. Restating the rules upfront tended to keep disagreements and confusion to a minimum, especially since the group had no written charter, which could alienate members who could not read.

“What is our goal?” President Aminata asked.

The members called back, “To divide what we have saved all year among ourselves.”

“How much do we save each week? What is the fine for not saving? What is the fine for missing a meeting?” Aminata continued, pausing after each question for the group’s reply. When the group had stated aloud the terms for loans they had agreed to and a reminder of the meeting time and place, the president called for the collection of savings.

Oral Accounting

Three women stood up. One held a key aloft as she stepped to the middle of the circle, while another bent down to pick up a metal box by her feet and brought it to the first. The president asked the group to announce the amount of money that should be in the box: 14,400 of the West African franc, abbreviated CFA (US$30).² The two women unlocked the box and placed it down so that the third woman could count the money. There was respectful silence while she worked. She announced, “14,400 CFA.” The first two women sat back in their places while the third, the cashier, remained with the box.

Next, the president asked to collect the fines owed from the last meeting for absences, tardiness, missing a savings deposit, and late loan payments. Failing to bring one’s savings deposit meant having to pay a 50 CFA fine (10 cents) the next week in addition to bringing both weeks’ savings. Being late cost another 25 CFA and an absence cost 50 CFA (5 and 10 cents, respectively) unless the member sent along her savings and a good excuse with another member.

A few women raised their hands and in turn called out the fine owed by the woman sitting to their immediate right. Group members always sat in the same order, so each person could act as a “helper” for the one next to her. When the president called the name of a woman who owed money, the woman stood, occasionally to the ribbing of her fellow group members if she was one of those who teased back. The group was serious about money but easy on each other. They repeated the amount of their fines and handed it to the cashier, who announced the payment to the group fund. Hearing each step made every member a participant in the accounting, ensuring that everyone could follow along and understand.³

After the fines came the savings. While most women saved a single share of 100 CFA ($0.20) per week, many committed at the beginning of the yearlong savings cycle to bringing two, three, or up to five times that amount. When the fund was divided, those who saved more would receive two to five times the dividend of a woman who saved only one share. When it was her turn, Bintou stepped to the cashier and placed 200 CFA—two shares—in the palm of the cashier, who counted it and placed it in the box. She sat back down and grabbed another handful of peanuts.

Collecting savings and fees was the last part of the short weekly meetings, which usually dissolved into an impromptu party before everyone had to head back to work. Once a month the group held an extended meeting for paying old loans and taking out new ones and for hosting topical discussions and trainings. This was one of those longer meetings. Each member with an outstanding loan paid the interest on her loan, 100 CFA for every 1,000 CFA borrowed, or 10 percent per month. They decided to charge each other this high interest rate so that they could build the loan fund more quickly and receive a larger payout when the fund was divided. Once the interest was paid, those whose loans were due that meeting repaid them in full. Most of the loans were small, under twenty dollars; fifty dollars would be considered a large loan for the group. The majority of women repaid within one month, although some loans were for two or three months, and agricultural loans extended over as many as six months. After loan business concluded, the cashier counted and announced the amounts of savings, fines, and loans collected and the new total in the cashbox—26,000 CFA (about US$53). This was how much they could lend out this meeting.

Requesting Loans

The president then asked whether anyone would like to take a loan. Three women raised their hands, including Bintou. President Aminata called on her to speak first. Bintou pushed aside the pile of peanuts at her feet and stepped around her basket to stand in the center of the circle. She explained to the group that she needed a loan of 5,000 CFA to buy smoked fish and onions here in Kouloukoura to sell at the big weekly market in Soma. For the past year she’d sold these in Soma along with bags of roasted peanuts. With the loan, she could purchase more stock and expand the business. It had been a loan from her Saving for Change group that had allowed Bintou to begin selling in the Soma market last year.

The president thanked Bintou and asked for the next person to speak. Kadija stepped to the middle of the circle. This was the first time Kadija approached the group for a loan; she had been too afraid of the interest charges to ever take one before. She joined the savings group to build a savings account and to take advantage of the interest garnered from the loans of others. She had joined also to handle emergencies such as she faced today.

Kadija explained to the group that her husband was very ill, stuck in bed with a fever. He had not been able to work in their millet field for more than a week and had missed a chance to sell a goat at the Soma market. The family was running low on rice and millet stores, and Kadija didn’t have cash to buy more. She requested an emergency loan to buy a bag of grain, to be paid back when her husband recovered. Kadija valued her privacy and her pride, so she hesitated to bring her family’s needs up for group discussion, but she appreciated her ability to do so. Her savings group was more discreet and reliable than asking her family or, worse, begging or going without.⁴

Several women responded with blessings and murmurs of good wishes for her husband’s recovery. Aminata spoke up, telling Kadija that Benkadi did not charge interest for loans in emergencies, and borrowers could pay the loan back at their own pace.⁵ The members of Benkadi prioritized emergency loans for helping members in need.⁶ Group members earned access to this safety net when each week they tightened their already narrow budgets and skimmed a few cents off their regular household purchases, depositing the money in the group fund. The effort other members put into gathering their savings validated each other’s economic struggles, while the buffer their savings and loans created to deal with risks like these motivated each to save more.⁷

Finally, Tabika explain her loan request. Tabika was one of the busier merchants of the group, supported by two sons in Bamako and a husband with steady income as a nurse at a community health center in a nearby village. Her youngest child, barely a year old, was wrapped in a pagne tied as a sling around her torso, resting his head drowsily on her shoulder. Tabika saved four shares in her Saving for Change group and regularly took out loans. She said her son was visiting from Bamako soon and she would like a two-month loan of 20,000 CFA ($40) to give him money to buy children’s clothes, which she would sell here and in Soma. Tabika already had an outstanding loan from a few weeks earlier for buying sweet potatoes to sell as French fries. She said the new loan would not interfere with paying back the first loan because she would separate them to make record keeping easier. She had begun taking overlapping loans very early in the savings cycle and had always paid on time.

LOAN 1: SUPPORTING A STRUGGLING BUSINESS

When everyone who wanted to take out a loan had finished explaining her needs, President Aminata opened each request to discussion in turn. She began again with Bintou. Bintou stood in the middle of the circle, listening to the discussion going on around her. Occasionally the group decided not to lend to someone or to ask a member to come to the next meeting with a revised plan more likely to result in timely payback. Other times they had to offer loans smaller than requested, depending on the amount of money available in the group fund at the time. Since it was their own savings that they were lending, the group was understandably cautious. That said, the members generally wanted to make loans because the loans would be repaid with interest. The more loans they make that are successfully repaid, the more money they accrue at the end of the savings cycle.

Bintou hoped her previous experience selling in the market would convince her fellow group members that she could easily make enough profits to pay back the loan and its interest, as well as earn a profit for herself and her family. One woman in particular disagreed. Assiatou argued that Bintou had missed her savings contributions at least once before, at the end of the lean season last year, before her family’s harvest had come in. She wondered aloud how well Bintou fit her business—including the long walk to and from the Soma market—around all her household chores, agricultural labor, and childcare, as the season wore on.

Another woman responded to Aminata. Fanta was well respected because of her age and because she was the oldest woman in her large extended family, which included her husband and six children, a younger co-wife and her four children, and her husband’s two younger brothers, their wives, and their children. Like Tabika, one of her sons worked in Bamako and her husband earned a regular salary, working as a schoolteacher, so her family had more money and was more educated than most in the village. She managed that household and her own garden and found time to cook and sell hot meals outside her home most evenings, stocking up on ingredients with regular loans from her savings group, where she saved five shares per week. Fanta’s opinion mattered, so when Fanta told the group that she’d seen Bintou sell out of her wares in the Soma market before, those who had been skeptical eased off. In the savings group, personal relationships replaced collateral as assurance that borrowers would repay their loans. Those who trusted Fanta believed in Bintou. Since Fanta was already well respected in the group, her endorsement meant a lot to the other members.

At this point President Aminata stood and asked the group’s members whether they thought Bintou should get her loan. A chorus of “Awo,” yes in Bambara, went up, and Aminata looked pointedly at those who had expressed disagreement earlier. Assiatou and a few others nodded yes.

LOAN 2: EMERGENCY FOOD CRISIS

Aminata brought Kadija’s request to the group. For the savings group, giving emergency loans to members in need filled many with pride. They could provide financial support to their friends and neighbors when what each could give individually would not have been enough. Kadija’s loan request received no opposition. Instead, a few women who knew Kadija’s family offered to bring a few bowlfuls of millet to her home before the market, to ensure that the family had enough to eat.

Kadija thanked everyone for her fortune to receive such generosity. Silently, she worried about repaying the kindness because, unlike Bintou and others in the group, Kadija rarely made or grew enough of anything to sell. Often she barely managed to make the weekly savings contribution, a few times struggling to pay fines for late payments on top of the regular deposits. She had skipped a meal that day and was tired from working in her family’s farm plot without her husband’s help over the past few days. She sat down heavily, grateful, tired, and already running the math in her head. With millet to make it to market day, she could buy enough grain with the loan to feed her family for another few weeks. She prayed that would be enough time for her husband to get better. Her family often ran out of food toward the end of the soudure dry season, just before harvest, but this was early, and it did not bode well for the leanest period.⁸ She wondered whether she would need to sell one of her husband’s goats herself and whether he would let her.

LOAN 3: SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS

Finally, Tabika stood up, the child tied to her back now awake and playing with her hair. Immediately, someone brought up Tabika’s outstanding loan. This didn’t faze her, and Tabika waited for a following speaker to remind the group that all year Tabika had loans that overlapped and had always paid them back on time. There had been one occasion several months ago when Tabika’s youngest child, barely an infant at the time, was sick with malaria. She had spent most of her loan money on medications and then become ill herself, unable to buy the ingredients to prepare the meals she sold. Even then, Tabika’s husband had stepped in and given her money to make her regular payment.⁹ Besides being grateful to his wife and for her ability to access the money they needed to care for their infant, Tabika’s husband wanted to be sure that she remained in good standing with her savings group because it had taken on such an important role in their family’s budget.

With a good record and visible, profitable businesses providing assurance, the group did not need to discuss Tabika’s request for long before agreeing to it.

Tabika thanked the group and sat down, conducting mental calculations of her own. Though her enterprises were some of the most successful of the group, Tabika’s trading had plateaued. She spent her loans on purchasing stock to trade, but her profits were constantly redirected to consumption needs for herself and her family. She was stuck in a pattern of taking out repeated loans to sustain the same activities as when she first joined her group.¹⁰

At the same time, while Tabika’s economic growth had stalled in the short term, she knew her savings and loans had enabled her to make economic decisions from a stable foundation upon which a better livelihood could be built—she could plan ahead knowing she had access to loans now and a share-out coming at the end of the year. This stability had a noticeable effect. Households in rural Mali operate in a climate of extreme and chronic vulnerability; unforeseen calamities such as malaria or drought regularly undermine planning for the long term. Perhaps over time, Tabika might be able to absorb greater risk and reinvest more and more of her earnings into a bigger business.

Loan Disbursements

Aminata announced the names of the three women receiving loans. Each walked toward the cashier, who announced the amount as she handed the money over. She calculated the 10 percent monthly interest on the loan, to be paid each month until the end of the loan, when the principal is due. Bintou pledged the amount aloud to the group: “I am taking a loan of 7,500 CFA for one month. I am going to pay the loan and 750 CFA in interest at the loan meeting next month.” Bintou’s helper repeated the message, committing it to memory.

The other borrowers went through the same process, though Kadija’s loan had no interest and it was understood that her payback date could be extended if need be. It was expected that she would do her best to pay back the loan before the group’s annual share-out. At the share-out, they would collect all outstanding loans and disburse the entire sum, including savings, interest, fines, and earnings from collective income-generating projects such as working as a group on a neighbor’s field for a day.

Once the loans were handed out, the cashier recounted the money left in the box and announced the total. Everyone joined hands and repeated the number together before the cashbox was closed and locked by Aminata. The money management portion of the meeting was over.

Malaria Education

At this point a woman seated across the circle from President Aminata stood up.¹¹ Djeneba had been quietly watching the group’s interactions. Djeneba was the group’s animator, the staff member of a local NGO who had arrived in Kouloukoura the previous year tasked with forming a Saving for Change group if the community was interested. She had spent the meeting reflecting on when she first organized these women into Benkadi. She had led introductory meetings with community leaders and later with villagers to explain the savings group idea, ask questions about the community’s financial practices and needs, and gauge enthusiasm for forming a group.

The members of Benkadi were the women who had been most excited to try out the new group saving idea. Many were slightly better off or more socially connected in the village, better positioned to risk trying the new idea.¹² Most had already pooled money together before in smaller cash “merry-go-round” groups called tontines, the traditional rotating savings associations common in Malian villages. In a tontine, members contribute a set amount of money to a pool that goes home with a different member in turn at each meeting. The simple mechanism enables its members to gather a usefully large sum of money for major purchases such as school fees or business investments, while requiring only small contributions at a time—particularly useful where members lack safe places to store growing cash savings and where the options for credit are nonexistent or perceived as usurious.

The Saving for Change idea sounded to them like an improvement on the basic tontine, turning weekly contributions into interest-garnering savings and allowing for flexible loan requests in different amounts and timeframes, a major difference from the rigidity of the tontine schedule. Importantly, the Saving for Change model still kept all money management within the group. Unlike the microfinance institutions that some households turned to, Saving for Change groups brought in no outside money. The interest on loans stayed with the group members, and no external collector would come to threaten a member who couldn’t pay. Unlike the microfinance institutions, too, Saving for Change had protections built in to ensure transparency through oral record keeping, so all of the members understood the group’s processes and finances, keeping everyone engaged and in control. Regular meetings reminded people to save each week. The familiarity of the group with its members helped ensure that loans were repaid—and it left enough flexibility that the group could respond to emergencies, as it had for Kadija today.

The animator, Djeneba, remembered how exciting it had been when she started training groups. For the first six months of their weekly meetings, she led them through discussions so that they could decide on their responsibilities as members and come up with group rules guiding interest rates and fines. They set a collective goal (to divide their group fund, which would have grown larger from interest collected over the year) and elected a president, key holders, and a cashbox keeper. During this planning time, they were regularly saving their shares, so by the second month of meetings they had saved enough capital to begin lending. The first loans were a big relief to the cashbox holder, who immediately saw the benefit of disbursing the savings into the hands of members, diversifying the responsibility for protecting the money (and generating interest income too, of course).

After a few months of weekly savings meetings and monthly lending meetings, the group handled more and more of the process itself, with Djeneba receding into the background. The key to group survival would rest on the animator’s ability to ensure that group members had confidence in themselves and the motivation to make the group work so that it could continue to operate without her.¹³ After six months, Djeneba reduced her visits to every other week, and after nine months, the group rarely had any need to look to her for help solving a question, so she visited just for the monthly extended loan meetings.

Now, a year later, the meetings seemed to run themselves. Djeneba usually visited only quarterly, when she recorded data about the group for her NGO, a Malian nonprofit that collected records on its Saving for Change groups for Oxfam America, which oversaw the overall program. The compiled data helped Oxfam America monitor the group’s progress and improve the program over time. Right now, though, Djeneba was halfway through a three-month additional training program for the group, a seven-session malaria prevention course. Malaria is a primary cause of death in young children in Mali and a leading cause of illness and its resulting loss of labor and income for all Malians.¹⁴ Many a group member’s business dream had been diverted when a malaria emergency forced a borrower like Tabika to spend loan capital on medicines or when exhaustion from the illness prevented a woman from implementing her plans. Most group members had survived the deaths of siblings or children. Because of the disease’s impact on their lives, many savings group members already had a strong understanding of malaria, but they welcomed the informed explanations from the NGO-trained animator.

After greeting the women, Djeneba launched into her training on malaria prevention, following a curriculum developed by Freedom from Hunger, Oxfam’s partner in Saving for Change. Instead of lecturing, she used the facilitation skills she’d practiced to generate dialogue. Djeneba encouraged the women to brainstorm and discuss ideas, allowing them to use their own judgment to evaluate why something like an insecticide-treated bed net would help protect from malaria-causing mosquitoes. Djeneba added that better nutrition and prenatal care could help make pregnant women, infants, and children stronger and more able to survive a bout of malaria, though not prevent it. She stepped in to dispel myths, such as that eating certain foods repelled mosquitoes. She asked the women what preventive tactics they used now and why.

“Is prevention better than treatment? Does the medicine always work? Can you always afford the medicine?” she asked the women, putting each question up for debate. “Who is most at risk for malaria?” Djeneba reminded them that infants and young children are most likely to die from malaria and that pregnant women who get infected are also at risk for anemia, low birth weight, or difficult births. Her goal was not to force everyone to always use bed nets but to ensure that the women learned enough to make educated choices about malaria prevention and treatment.

As she wrapped up, she told them that next month she’d discuss how to treat a bed net with insecticide so that they could do it at home, which is cheaper than buying a pretreated net. Djeneba thanked the women for their engagement and let them know she would stay after the meeting if anyone wanted to talk to her.

Replicating Agent Training

The training session concluded. President Aminata stood up once more. She thanked the members for coming to the meeting and reminded them of the time and location of next week’s meeting. The women broke up into little groups, chatting, while a few with pressing tasks hurried home. The women who had brought things to work on, like Bintou had her peanuts, gathered up baskets or tied cloths into bundles, squatting down to hoist heavy loads on top of their heads.

Djeneba stepped away from a conversation with President Aminata to catch Bintou as she left the mango tree. Bintou put a hand up to steady the peanut basket as she turned back, curious and a little nervous—she had been awarded a lot of loan money that afternoon. What if the group had made a mistake and Djeneba was about to correct it?

Djeneba instead launched into a proposal.¹⁵ She had just attended a “training for trainers” course taught by her NGO. They had asked animators like her to find Saving for Change members who had the dedication, open-mindedness, and passion to organize more women in their villages into Saving for Change groups and teach the skills to run their meetings themselves. She asked Bintou if she would like to train new groups in her village. Would Bintou like to become a replicating agent?

Bintou asked what the work entailed. Djeneba explained that if she agreed, they would go together to speak with Bintou’s husband and get his agreement too before moving forward. Then Bintou would be invited to a three-day training with other replicating agents, where she would learn the process of organizing a group. She would receive a picture-based manual that leads replicating agents step by step through the process of forming a group.

Many women in Bintou’s village had already approached Djeneba about forming them into a new Saving for Change group. As a replicating agent, Bintou would take on this task—she would help the women form a group, go over the steps of a meeting, and guide them to set their rules. Then she would attend their meetings as Djeneba did for Benkadi, helping members practice the steps, intervening less and less as the members learned to run the group themselves.

Bintou thought for a moment, considering the suggestion. Her small business had grown since she started selling vegetables with her first loan last year. With the added money from the business and share-outs, her family was eating better, even during the lean seasons when her family’s grain storage was used up. With that first loan, Bintou found she could focus on increasing the yield in her garden by purchasing fertilizer and that she could afford the cost of travel to the bigger market to develop her trading business. Bintou had noticed a transformative difference in her life as loans and share-outs allowed her new business to grow. She still felt as though she worked all the time, but her labor had been paying off lately. Bintou knew she could spare a few hours per week to help other women in her village experience the same changes in their lives.

Djeneba emphasized that while animators may have technical knowledge, replicating agents come from the communities they organize, so they have a deeper knowledge of their neighbors’ circumstances and needs. Djeneba explained that replicating agents are volunteers—Bintou wouldn’t be paid—but her fellow villagers would respect her for this work. For some other replicating agents, newly trained groups had even volunteered a day of labor in the agent’s garden to thank her and keep her motivated. This was an important role.

Bintou nodded slowly. Saving for Change was important to her. Members gained the ability to meet some of their families’ endless immediate needs, smoothing the harshest valleys of their variable incomes; at the same time, many like Bintou could begin to save enough money to invest in a business, one that could someday be profitable enough to substantially alter their living conditions. Bintou could see that through these weekly savings and loans for small businesses, the group helped its members be better off. Emergency loans helped them weather illness and disaster, so they could avoid selling precious assets such as livestock or expensive farm equipment when circumstances might otherwise have forced them to sell livestock, or a plow, or a donkey-pulled cart. The changes in Bintou’s life and the lives of her fellow group members were small, but they were significant. Life was less stressful now.

She agreed with Djeneba to go speak with her husband. She liked the idea of spreading this idea, helping to form savings groups.