CHAPTER 5

The Most Productive Asset of All: Empowering Friends and Neighbors

A savings group is a special kind of group, with a clear, indisputable purpose to fulfill an obvious, practical need. Savings groups encourage regular, continuing participation, and in doing so offer participants membership in a social club and the chance to engage in collective action. The practical nature of Saving for Change can become an excuse, a reason, to gather and work together.

In many ways, Saving for Change was perfectly adapted to fit the culture of rural Mali. There, many women already organize themselves in tontine groups to manage their money. Collective projects such as village gardens or work parties organized to share labor on each other’s fields are common. What would happen if instead of capitalizing on a culture in which collective action and women’s groups are commonplace and strong, we used the ability of Saving for Change to create social solidarity as an end goal?

In Central America, we brought Saving for Change to communities where trust had been torn by decades of violence from civil war, drug trafficking, and gangs, and where social norms meant that many women remained cloistered in their homes. The pull of regular meetings could, in certain circumstances, become even more important than the underlying motive of financial management. Even in these instances, the usefulness of a safe place to save and the draw of credit continued to motivate and justify those meetings. We saw both the outcome and the mechanism work together to improve people’s lives. In Central America, we began an experiment in places where a lack of social solidarity itself was a major challenge.

El Salvador

I was excited to bring Saving for Change to Latin America. I had spent my Peace Corps service working with small farmers in Ecuador as they advocated for land rights, and I had later worked with Acción International to develop microfinance in the region. Bringing savings groups to Latin America also gave me a chance to see how the model would thrive in El Salvador, where I had first learned about microfinance twenty-five years earlier. We began with a feasibility study in Chalatenango at the invitation of the Oxfam America regional office in El Salvador.

We were drawn to El Salvador for several reasons. One was the high rate of both poverty and income inequality. In terms of income, El Salvador is one of the most unequal countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.¹ The wealthiest 20 percent of the population controls almost half of the country’s wealth, while the poorest 20 percent controls just 6 percent of wealth. Within El Salvador, Chalatenango is one of the poorest regions. Half of the population lives below the poverty line, and while one in five children nationwide suffers from malnutrition, in the poorest provinces, like Chalatenango, the rate doubles to 40 percent.² Chalatenango was heavily affected by El Salvador’s civil war and its border with Honduras became a main site of refugee movement. We branded Saving for Change as Ahorro Comunitario (Community Savings) and selected Chalatenango as the place we would start.

LAUNCHING SAVING FOR CHANGE IN CHALATENANGO

We began in Chalatenango, as always, with a feasibility study to explain the concept, gauge interest, and perhaps modify the model to fit local needs. As we explained Saving for Change to various groups of women, they listened politely and then calmly explained to us that they were too poor to save. In the words of one woman, how could they save when they “do not see a dollar all week?”³ The first question Malian participants asked us was, “When can you start?” In Chalatenango, each woman we spoke with told us that she was not interested. We proposed to launch Saving for Change in an area where it was seemingly not feasible.

El Salvador had no savings or ROSCA tradition such as the tontines in Mali.⁴ Some of the resistance to the idea of saving money was rooted in the economic structure in Chalatenango, where cash is not the most important form of income. The vast majority of Chalatenango’s families worked on small family farms raising corn and beans, supplemented by remittances from relatives working abroad and a few small businesses—making tamales or the ubiquitous Salvadorian treat pupusas (tortillas stuffed with cheese).

Our interviewees, all of them women, also told us that they were afraid. El Salvador has the second highest murder rate in the world.⁵ So prevalent are violence and crime that women suggested that by pooling money they would be putting not just their savings, but also their lives, at risk.⁶ They were skeptical of the idea of collecting all their money in one place, even if the Saving for Change model encouraged loaning that money right back out.

Despite the negative feedback, some promising organizations were interested in launching Ahorro Comunitario: Association of Communities for Development in Chalatenango (Coordinadora de Comunidades para el Desarrollo de Chalatenango, CCR) and Caritas.⁷ CCR is a member-run community organization pairing political mobilization with service delivery, with programs ranging from environmental advocacy to providing water and electricity.⁸ CCR is the largest organization in Chalatenango. It has a small headquarters office, with several decentralized member-elected boards of directors and volunteer-led committees acting in each community, representing groups or issues related to youth, women, education, and culture, among others. Caritas is the social ministry of the Catholic Church, mandated with carrying out the church’s mission to promote social and environmental justice.⁹ Both organizations were enthusiastic about the participatory process of Saving for Change and agreed on the need for a savings and loan program in a region where reliance on subsistence agriculture leaves many families without enough liquid cash to meet daily needs throughout the year.¹⁰

Given the enthusiasm of these strong local organizations, my own pull toward the region, and the availability of funding, we decided to launch a small pilot project to test the program in this challenging context. Oxfam America’s program officer, Milagro Maravilla, took on the role of coordinating Saving for Change in El Salvador. If you know a bit of Spanish, you know that Milagro Maravilla’s name translates into English as “marvelous miracle.” It seemed we would need such a miracle to be successful in Chalatenango. Luckily, we had one.

Cecilia (Ceci) Ramírez of Caritas and Esperanza Ortega from CCR were hired by Milagro to become the first promotoras (trainers). Both were respected leaders in their communities for many years. Cecilia’s background was in teaching adult literacy skills, and even though she had only a ninth-grade education, she wanted to share what she knew.¹¹ Meanwhile, as a young woman during the civil war, Esperanza of CCR had returned from a refugee camp in Honduras to join the guerillas in El Salvador, and ever since then she had remained committed to struggling for social justice for her community.¹² Once Esperanza and Ceci had organized and trained a few groups—with great effort—that initial success was sufficient to secure more funding, and another ten promotoras were hired.

Oxfam America hired Carmen Fabian Guardado to oversee the project. In her early forties at the time she joined Saving for Change, she too came from a postwar organizing background, having joined CCR as a teenager to help resettle refugees after the civil war. Despite her experience working with local community members, she found that promoting Saving for Change was a challenge. She told me the following story, which encapsulates how difficult it was to launch the program:

I went with Ceci to a community called Pacayas, and we were happy because thirty women showed up at the meeting. … As we presented the program, we noticed that the women were leaving one by one. Finally, there were only a few women left and Ceci began to laugh, and I told her that we could still work with them. Then she told me that those few remaining women were there to close up the church.¹³

Women complained that Saving for Change offered nothing but training, when most NGOs donated free services or goods. They raised concerns that this project might be a scam (of which they had seen plenty before) or that members would not pay back their loans and that the staff would steal the money. Carmen quipped “We should have had a banner that said, ‘No one other than you is going to touch your money!’”¹⁴

Despite the initial skepticism of some of the women, five years later our initial optimism that people would join these groups was warranted. Today in El Salvador there are more than four hundred groups in place with 8,584 members.¹⁵ Groups that were saving little are now saving much more, and some groups are lending out every penny in their group fund. The leaders of some groups are training new groups on their own. Even when funding for the team of twelve promotoras ended after three years, according to Milagro, “The promotoras continued supporting the groups that they had trained earlier as volunteers.”¹⁶ Today, the president of CCR is one of the former promotoras of Saving for Change. While we saw a quick launch of Saving for Change in Mali, it took five years of intensive work, and double or triple the investment per group, to launch the program in Chalatenango. The same outcome, but it took longer.

THE PROMOTORAS

Much of the success of Saving for Change in El Salvador can be attributed to these promotoras, who saw something worthwhile in the method and persisted in organizing savings groups despite conditions that would make most people give up. Carmen told me, “What you read in a report does not represent even one quarter of the sweat and blood it took to reach those numbers. It is very easy to trivialize what was accomplished if you do not know what it cost to organize the women, to convince them to join, and to ensure that the groups did not fall apart.” I learned a lot from the promotoras of Chalatenango. I learned that you cannot be half-committed to do something, and that commitment takes a lot of work. The groups are delicate, and with only a single misunderstanding they can fail.

In 2013, I returned to Chalatenango to interview the staff and volunteer promotoras of Caritas and CCR to better understand why the program had met so much resistance in its early phases and to ask what it was that caused the promotoras to continue with such dogged persistence to organize savings groups. What I found was a group of women who had survived the extremes of poverty, machismo, and conflict. Many of these narratives of hardship coexisted alongside empowering stories of grassroots (and, in some cases, guerilla) organizing. Milagro explained that she sought out experience and dedication in her staff. “What made the difference was that we contracted women with a high degree of commitment to their communities, women who saw this as providing a service more than a job.”¹⁷ No wonder so many continued to organize groups even when they were left on their own. Here is one of these stories. What struck me was that every promotora and volunteer I spoke with had been active in their communities since the age of thirteen or fourteen.

Blanca Miriam Ayala Mejía, former president of the board of CCR, summed up how Ahorro Comunitario had influenced her organization, beginning by telling me about the transformative impact of being part of the program. “Sometimes when women came to the [Saving for Change] meetings they were afraid to even move out of the house, they couldn’t speak, they were embarrassed, and they were afraid. … The organizational capacity, creativity, and solidarity between women has increased. At first the men were opposed but little by little they were convinced, and some even joined groups.” Then she went on to say:

Now there are women who are part of the village councils and who are mayors. Before there was jealousy among the men of the CCR board of directors about our work with women. Now this problem of jealousy has been resolved. They are not the women they were before, who would only vote for men to be the directors. Now we elect a man and we also elect a woman, and this helps the women think and participate.… If you focus on what this organization does, women are the ones getting things moving and doing everything. … There are empowered groups that will not fall apart easily. Saving for Change has created solidarity among women, and this strengthens the groups. CCR’s support is important because with CCR’s support the groups can go beyond savings.¹⁸

SAVING FOR CHANGE IN EL SALVADOR TODAY

It is clear that the organizers at CCR view savings groups as a means to achieve much more than economic gains for the groups’ members. They emphasize, however, that meeting material needs is a crucial foundation for further empowerment. Ana Margarita Alvarenga, the Caritas promotora, told me how different women use the groups to manage their household finances and earnings. Although most of the groups started saving very little and were afraid to make loans, some groups, such as the one Ana Margarita describes, have evolved into substantial minifinancial organizations. This is how she describes her group today, which was organized five years earlier:

Some of the members buy fishing nets wholesale and resell them; they sell propane gas to earn more. There are many demands for credit. Many carry out their business as a group to sell things like tamales, pastries, or bread. With the extra training they received, some women have gardens.… Some women have used their loans to go to school and for healthcare to buy medicines. The largest loan in our group was $600 for one month to help a member’s husband buy cattle to sell. With the profits, they are building a house. Often there is no money to lend out and up to now we have never had a bad experience.

Another group is making loans from $200 to $1,500. Small loans are for selling clothing, propane, and fishing nets. Some people are saving from $20 to $30 every meeting. … There are also groups that carry out small economic activities to earn money for the group fund like selling lunches. We do $0.25 to $1 raffles in the group, with the profits going to build the group fund. With just savings, the group fund does not grow very fast. For those not getting remittances, it is hard to save even $2.¹⁹

Of course, even these practical matters do not get in the way of organizing. “At times when we are meeting, we are not only talking about the group but about problems in the community,” Ana Margarita continued. “For example, ADESCO [Asociación de Desarrollo Communal, Association for Community Development] has started to help someone in the community who doesn’t have a house, and we as a group are going to see how we can help, and we are taking it upon ourselves to help the community carry out a project.”²⁰

Sonia Aleman, on the Saving for Change technical team for CCR, described how Saving for Change has allowed members and their communities to better weather the global financial crisis, which reduced the availability of credit to poor farmers:

As the economic crisis deepens, the women are seeing their groups as an alternative. They don’t have the documentation that the government requires for its loan funds, so they are using their groups that their communities already have as an alternative. The women are lending to their husbands for agriculture. These loans charge less interest and are less bureaucratic, and no guarantees—the house, the land—are required. The problem is that our land and our houses are in the names of our husbands and we can’t get loans from the bank, so women are taking the initiative.²¹

Saving for Change created a base upon which CCR was able to expand its political strategy. Sonia explained:

We organized the groups into networks. Each group elected one representative. All the groups in a village became a network whose representatives met together every month to share what they had accomplished and the difficulties that they faced. Now we have nineteen networks of groups. In these meetings the women think about what they can do beyond savings and lending. We also train the new leaders of the groups because they restructure the leadership of the groups after they close the cycles, rotating leadership roles amongst different women so more can gain this valuable experience.

We are creating women’s associations, and these groups are starting to establish relationships with the municipal government through formal, legal recognition, in order to be able to move beyond just being an informal network. This will force the municipalities to do what they are already required to do, given that they now have a Women’s Unit and a budget earmarked for supporting women’s organizational activities. We need to put on pressure because providing this assistance to women is now not something that they are going to do because they are good people, but because it is a law that they have to follow.²²

Saving for Change provided a tool to accomplish a larger goal: grassroots political organizing. Carmen’s passion shines when she explains this key concept. “Empowering women doesn’t come out of nothing,” she told me. “It doesn’t come out of ideas; it needs to respond to the concrete material conditions of the women. I believe that this is the key.”²³ She continued:

Despite the handout mentality, individualism, and negative factors such as consumerism, there is always the possibility for change, and to a large degree, I think we were able to break this handout mentality as we built the power of these women. Politics is linked to economics. For them, making a small decision such as deciding when to meet made them realize that they could build power from their organization.

Some started reaching out and visiting the mayor’s office. Yes, the objective was financial, but the groups opened the political dimension. That is to say, you can’t have empowerment if you have nothing. Once you resolve the material question, empowerment is nothing magical. The savings groups built empowerment, and that enabled them to see possibilities.”²⁴

Guatemala

The example of Guatemala helps us better understand the processes at work that made what is a financial project at the surface level into a grassroots political-organizing tool in El Salvador. We brought Saving for Change to Guatemala in early 2010.²⁵ Guatemala, like El Salvador, has high rates of rural poverty and an economy wracked by centuries of inequality. The two countries, like the rest of Central America, share similar histories, having been dominated by extractive industries, beginning with Spanish colonialism in the 1500s onward to the banana republic plantation economies that thrived in the 1950s. Today, Guatemala is economically the most unequal country in Latin America and among the most unequal countries in the world.²⁶

As in El Salvador, the history of exploitation in Guatemala was paralleled by one of organized resistance movements by indigenous people, campesino farmers, urban poor, and plantation day laborers. In the 1970s and 1980s, diverse leftist guerilla movements and the right-wing owning class (including the military, political, and business elite) across Central America became proxies for the wider Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, receiving military training, arms, and aid. The proxy wars, tied to international-level political maneuvering, enabled the localized conflicts, fueled by deep personal hatreds, racism, and greed.²⁷

Meanwhile, international economic processes over the last thirty-five years also helped maintain the structural inequalities that have long characterized Guatemalan society. Today, Guatemala has the highest rate of malnutrition in Latin America and the fourth highest rate of chronic malnutrition in the world,²⁸ rates comparable to a desert country like Mali. About half the children in Guatemala are undernourished (including 80 percent of indigenous children),²⁹ even as Guatemala’s main export products are foodstuffs: coffee, sugar, bananas, vegetables, and ethanol (made from corn).³⁰

Oxfam chose to introduce Saving for Change in the regions of Alta Verapaz and Baja Verapaz in central Guatemala, where large indigenous populations overlapped with high rates of poverty and women’s illiteracy and where few other international development organizations already worked.³¹ Alta and Baja Verapaz are also in the middle of the drug-smuggling corridor.

There was another major pull for choosing to launch Saving for Change in these neighboring central regions. Both regions were home to many experienced grassroots community organizers and existing women’s committees.³² We would be working not only in an area with great need, but one full of people already engaged in the sort of locally owned and locally managed development that Saving for Change embodies. We knew from our experience in El Salvador that if we could engage the strengths of women organizers who already embraced an empowerment methodology, then Saving for Change would reach far more women—and it would offer the organizers a useful financial tool with which to increase participation in their broader economic and social justice repertoire. This was a great way for us to support that work without directly intervening in or directing it.

SAVING FOR CHANGE AND WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT

A few months after the launch of Saving for Change in Guatemala, we carried out a study in Alta Verapaz and Baja Verapaz to establish a baseline against which we could measure change. One key finding was that while economic indicators such as wealth were the same between those who chose to join groups and those who did not, “women who join Saving for Change groups appear to be more empowered than non-members.”³³ Women who choose to join Saving for Change tend to be more socially active, to be less likely to need permission from a partner or father to visit friends outside their village, to participate in community or church groups, and to have more experience managing finances (saving or borrowing).³⁴

Everywhere we worked required an incredible effort to get the first group going. Not until the first group of risk-taking savers got their money back at share-out were others willing to join.

Angélica Mazariegos, supervisor of the Association of Community Health Services (Asociación de Servicios Comunitarios de Salud, ASECSA), explained, “There were a lot of women in these communities, but when it was time to sign up, only a few were interested.”³⁵ In Guatemala, this hesitation to join showed a healthy skepticism of outsider interventions that was nurtured by past experiences with failed or false projects.

In Guatemala, we found another barrier to group participation: husbands. Many men there prohibited their wives from participating in women’s collective action and even threatened them with violence.

Supervisor Eleazar Timotea Castro of the Teaching Institute for Sustainable Development (Instituto de Enseñanza para el Desarrollo Sostenible, IEPADES), one of Oxfam America’s NGO partners in Guatemala, told the story of how a whole group united around one woman whose husband forbade her to participate in Saving for Change:

About six months ago a woman from Chujomil had issues with her husband, even though her husband was in the US. He would tell her that she didn’t need to be part of a group. She would send the savings without telling her husband, but he still pressured her, he had control over her from afar. She eventually could not take it anymore and told the group that she could not continue because of her husband and because her in-laws had control over her as well, and that’s why she was leaving the group. But the women were supportive and helped nurture a different vision of what was happening. They told her that the group is an opportunity and that her husband doesn’t know all the problems we have resolved as a group because he doesn’t always send you money on time. [She] cried and cried.³⁶ She would not stop crying. The whole group went to her in-laws to explain what the group was, but [she] left. [She] cried because she wanted to participate.

Her friends encouraged her to have the courage to tell her husband that she has the right to participate and that the group is an opportunity. [She] and her children talked on the phone. Now her husband sends her money to save. She is good with the group and thankful of the other women who gave her the courage and the support to resolve the problem. We have a lot of cases like this one.³⁷

This story did not take place in a vacuum. In a comprehensive review of studies of gender-based violence in Guatemala, Karen Musalo, director of the California-based Center for Gender and Refugee Studies (CGRS), demonstrates that Guatemala today is undergoing a crisis.³⁸ Musalo concludes, “Violence against women has become ‘normalized’ in Guatemala and is broadly accepted despite the efforts of human rights and women’s groups to overcome this widespread acquiescence.”³⁹

In a rural area where women are generally confined to their homes and expected to follow their husbands’ direction on basic financial decisions, a group like Saving for Change may be quite radical. Women’s groups, which allow members space to make decisions and act for themselves, can be sites of safety, support, and resistance to this status quo. Saving for Change creates a materially useful reason for women to leave the household and meet and socialize with other women.

The promotoras and volunteers who work with Saving for Change know and act on this—they use Saving for Change as a tool to organize women in their communities. “The money, the savings, is a hook to get everyone organized,” says Carmelina Chocooj, the Oxfam America program officer in Alta Verapaz.⁴⁰ “In general terms, the program is really important to poor women and the communities. This is the only way of keeping the women organized. In Guatemala, there hasn’t been a project that can keep the women together like the savings program.” Carmelina shared how in her experience, savings groups can become platforms for members to advocate on one another’s behalf. “Now the women show solidarity to other women who are victims of domestic abuse, they bring them to court or have conflict resolution and accountability processes in their community.”

Angélica Mazariegos, a supervisor with ASECSA in Baja Verapaz, explained how training volunteers is an opportunity to strengthen women’s leadership in each community. “I see the volunteers as engines in the community, collectively teaching the methodology, and that’s why we’ve focused on increasing the capacity that they have, because we know that [the volunteer] is going to stay in the community and keep the groups alive.”⁴¹

Participation in Saving for Change has given members the ability to assert their human rights. Before Saving for Change, said Elena Garzón,⁴² a volunteer from Baja Verapaz, “women were discriminated against. We were overlooked. They told us, ‘You can’t participate because you’re a woman.’” She emphasized the importance of the savings group as a safe space. “Now we have that liberty to participate, to express ourselves, to value ourselves as women and somewhere to seek shelter when we have been physically or mentally mistreated. … The people say: ‘It is true that we have rights, but since we do not know [what they are] we let ourselves be hurt and taken advantage of.’ But now if a husband hits his wife, he goes to prison.”⁴³

THE CONDEMAV ELECTION SLATE

In Guatemala, a very special political victory was born out of the organizing around Saving for Change. Carmelina Chocooj was working for the Rigoberta Menchú Foundation on human rights in 2007 when she founded a community organization to focus on indigenous people’s rights. Her organization, the Confederation of Women of Alta Verapaz (Confederación de Mujeres de Alta Verapaz, CONDEMAV), decided to partner with Oxfam America’s Saving for Change program in Guatemala in 2011. Carmelina attended a training in Chalatenango, El Salvador, and from there, she and the local Saving for Change team she hired managed to organize every single woman in her village into savings groups.⁴⁴

Once she brought all the women in her village together, they mobilized their collective strength into a voting bloc. Then they took it one step further:

There was a community assembly in which the community authority said a new authority would be elected in fifteen days. So the women from the savings groups organized themselves and proposed a ballot with a woman candidate to be Mayor. [Our] other candidates ended up being another woman, a man, and one more woman. It was an inclusive ballot, but the women were going to hold key positions. They called this ballot “The Star.”

So there were three ballots: a ballot of the outgoing authority, a ballot from the men in the community, and one from the women of the savings groups. … That Sunday came and we were all nervous, worried because it was our first experience trying to take power. The voting hour came. They all went and voted.

When they counted the votes, 95 percent of the votes were for the inclusive ballot—the women from the savings groups won! Now these women were part of the community authority. This, to me, is the biggest success we have had in Guatemala and more specifically in Alta Verapaz, within the communities of Tipulcán.…

After two months, we had elections at a regional level. There are fifteen to twenty communities [in the region]. Now [our candidate] is the mayor at a higher level, twenty-eight communities. She has [support from] savings groups and continues to win, so she is the mayor of the community and the region.⁴⁵

The Star slate of candidates won 90 percent of the vote in the local election.⁴⁶ CONDEMAV’s victory demonstrates the power of organizing: once women have a reason to get together, they can act together. In this community, organized women were able to take on an entire political system. The useful nature of Saving for Change makes it a particularly good tool for engaging women despite a culture of masculinity that discourages women’s public participation.

Catalina Hernández⁴⁷ is a survivor of domestic violence and poverty and an outspoken advocate on behalf of indigenous people’s land rights and environmental justice in the face of mining corporations. She joined a Saving for Change group in 2011, was elected president of her group, and then volunteered to train more savings groups, helping to form about twenty-five of them. Catalina united all the savings groups in her community into a women’s network. She sums up the transformative power of feminist organizing through Saving for Change:

The thing is that there are a lot of men who do not let [women] participate. … The men are opposed to it because they say the women are going to go learn how to give them orders and tell them what to do. They believe they have to tell us what to do. The fear that they have is that the women will wake up and say that the men can no longer give them orders. That’s what they say in some cases [but] in others, there are men who have finally understood that saving is good, and they are doing it too. The situation has gotten better. Now some of the women say that they do not have to obey the men. … Now [men and women] can be in communication, be at home and share the work.

Although all the savings groups in El Salvador and Guatemala took full advantage of the financial benefits afforded by Saving for Change to pursue small business ventures and to smooth irregular income, many of the groups were able to use the savings groups for much more than saving and lending. In Central America, Saving for Change became a platform for broader community organizing and empowerment around important social and political issues.