CHAPTER 3

“Dependency Is Not Empowering”

It 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.

Pact’s Women’s Empowerment Program in Nepal

We first arrived in Katmandu during the monsoon. Driving out from the city to the lowlands on the border with India, we watched out the window of the car as we descended down treacherous Himalayan roads into the open wetland valley—Nepal’s Terai region and its thousands of villages. Our process was simple. Pact’s senior leadership in Nepal introduced us to the local NGO staff that directly trained villages on the savings group model. We visited WEP groups each day, and Lisa and I, with one or two of Pact’s staff to translate, observed the WEP groups’ regular meetings. After the meetings, Lisa and I spoke with the groups and asked questions.

We interviewed two to three groups per day, in school buildings, on porches, or in courtyards of houses of better-off group members or community leaders. Each night, Lisa and I and the small WEP team traveling with us reviewed what we learned over sweet buffalo-milk tea, momos, and dal. From these visits, we learned the basic process group members used to collect savings, ask for loans, and record transactions. Sometimes we dropped into villages by surprise and pulled together meetings to ensure that we did not just see the preselected, cherry-picked groups. It was encouraging that these groups also worked quite well and operated by the same principles.

These were the basics: WEP was organizing women into several twenty-person groups in each village. In total, more than 130,000 women joined 6,500 WEP groups in little more than a year.² This achievement was extraordinary in itself, as no microfinance program I had heard of over the previous two decades had grown so quickly. The program grew so fast because it did not need to build a financial institution to provide loans; instead, it built on preexisting literacy and forest conservation groups—even microcredit groups. Each WEP group was a miniature financial institution in which the money loaned out came directly from members’ weekly contributions to their savings accounts, and where the profits from borrowers’ interest returned to and increased the size of the savings account of each member. Unlike credit unions, which often have hundreds or even thousands of members and are regulated to protect member savings, WEP groups operated informally under the regulatory radar. Transparency and self-management took the place of regulation. Regulation was not necessary; members observed every savings deposit and loan payment and discussed and approved every loan at their weekly meetings.

The members of the savings groups were careful because they were managing their own money. There were neither matching funds or handouts nor a link to an external credit source. “Dependency is not empowering,” Marcia told us on our arrival, a mantra that she repeated with equal fervor every time we met. Group members purchased the lockboxes where they stored their money between meetings, the forms they used to keep their records—even the kerosene they used for the lanterns for their evening literacy classes. Instead of waiting for a handout, they took charge. Because they were in charge, the program grew quickly.

WEP had opened a new market for financial inclusion. Few of the almost entirely illiterate and impoverished members of the WEP groups had ever thought of taking out a loan from an MFI. They had no assets for a guarantee or any business to invest in, yet they were saving and borrowing. The few women we met who had previously taken out loans from MFIs now saved and borrowed only through their groups. “Why pay them,” one woman said, “when we can pay ourselves.”

As I learned more, Marcia’s logic began to make sense. Every four months the groups distributed dividends to their members based on the profits from lending. Members explained to us how borrowing from their groups built their savings—even if it took a while to obtain a loan or if the loan might be smaller than they wanted because the amount they could borrow was naturally limited by the tiny amounts each group member saved. They were willing to wait.

While interacting with groups composed of some of Nepal’s most marginalized women, Lisa and I noticed a pattern. At the beginning of every meeting, each person introduced herself. In recently formed groups, some members could barely muster the courage to stand up and stammer their names before sitting down to cover their heads in embarrassment, not wanting to speak in front of outsiders such as ourselves. By contrast, in groups that were a year old or more, the women not only introduced themselves proudly, they also eagerly answered our questions, and not just the group leaders but regular members chimed in as well.

WEP was about more than saving and lending—it was called the “Women’s Empowerment Program” for a reason. Sometimes, even before receiving the specialized training on women’s legal rights provided to many groups by the Asia Foundation, members leveraged their savings groups into advocacy groups.³ We learned about groups coming together to work against partner abuse, alcoholism, and child marriage in their communities. Marcia recalled how it was common in the Terai region for human traffickers to recruit young girls by offering poor mothers money to send their daughters to “waitressing jobs,” which were really brothels in India. Their daughters were their last remaining asset. Nepalese girls were in high demand by traffickers since they would be easier to control in a foreign country where they could not speak the language. WEP groups became a platform from which women rallied against the exploitation of their children by human traffickers. They told me they felt more courageous now that they were organized.

One image remains vivid in my mind. Lisa and I were talking to a group of women in southern Nepal, a village so close to the Indian border that we could see it. Members were telling us what had by then become a common refrain: with their WEP group, the women had their own money, so their husbands showed them more respect. They had joined with other groups to advocate against child marriages. Meanwhile, through a gap in the high adobe wall, I could see that a group of men was meeting on the other side. Through our translator, I learned that the village imam was exhorting the men to keep their wives subservient and under control. Two group meetings, two different agendas. The WEP groups appeared to be giving women more say in their households and as community-level advocates for women and children, but they faced considerable resistance.

Literacy was another pillar of the WEP program—in fact, it was the program’s foundation. Pact had promoted literacy in Nepal for many years, providing literacy training through more than a thousand local NGOs. Pact used simple, well-crafted workbooks that taught new readers important information or skills while they learned to read. For WEP groups, the literacy workbooks taught members how to organize their group and how to keep records. Additional workbooks explained human and civil rights and how to run a business. Costs for literacy training were minimal because the instructors were local volunteers trained and supported by WEP’s NGO partners. These committed volunteers met with their groups four evenings per week. The women studied and chanted the words in the workbooks, and as they learned to read, they learned the practical and the transformative messages the workbooks contained.

Saving and lending plus advocacy and literacy training made for a powerful program. However, it was something that I learned entirely by accident that brought to my attention just how important these groups were for their members. One of the group leaders mentioned that she had trained another group. Lisa and I were intrigued. Wasn’t it the NGO’s responsibility to train new groups? Why did she do it? The group leader told us she wanted to share what she had learned. In a village we visited a few days later, another leader proudly showed me her dog-eared WEP manual. “I trained twenty-one groups using that manual,” I remember her saying. Voluntary replication became a central theme of our questioning.

At the end of our first tour in Nepal, we brought together group leaders to answer some final questions about WEP, focused especially on their particular role in training others in the method. We learned that compared with the structured way that WEP staff trained groups, the member-leaders’ approach could hardly be more informal. Often, a few women from their village would approach a group leader, curious about what the group was doing. The leader would invite them to attend a meeting. On leaving the meeting, she would tell the women to round up fifteen or so others interested in saving and lending, and if they could pull together a group, she would train them.

I asked the leaders, “Since so many of you are already training groups, why not make a business out of it?” The immediate response was “No!”—almost in unison from all fifty women. One continued: “We would not be trusted; our motivations would be suspect. We train groups because women are asking for our help. How could we refuse them?” Later, when it came time to design a community finance program for Oxfam America, I would remember how much these women valued their savings groups. They inspired me to build the training of member-trainers into the design of Saving for Change.

WEP provided an answer to my growing uncertainty about how microfinance could reach villagers in numbers that could make a difference: not with loans that are often too big to manage and even more difficult to repay, but with financial services that meet the needs of village women. This was effective financing for women in scattered villages where financial institutions are weak and money is scarce, but it was also something more—a member-managed, member-owned model that spread through the enthusiasm of its local leaders.

Why did it work? Lisa and I reflected on this question after many days of research in Nepal. The answer was as simple as it was profound: WEP had abandoned the costly infrastructure that MFIs use to deliver loans—all the staff it takes to secure capital, make loans, collect on them, and prevent fraud. Due to the complexity of managing a loan fund, a typical MFI has, on average, one staff person for every 284 outstanding loans.⁴ The task of the WEP staff and the 250 some NGO partners with which WEP collaborated was much simpler: to train groups until they could operate on their own. Once a group mastered record keeping, the paid staff could focus on WEP’s literacy and empowerment agenda and move on to train more groups, whereas bank and MFI staff had to spend time making loans and tracking payments for as long as the group borrowed. Besides requiring fewer staff and for a shorter duration than an MFI, a model that transferred management to the group members introduced another important difference between WEP groups and institutional microfinance. Success became defined in terms of sustainability of the groups instead of the long-term survival and growth of the financial institutions—the locus of success was at the level of the member, not the organization.

WEP was based on the assumption that groups quickly learn how to manage themselves if asked the right questions. They called their training “appreciative inquiry,” an area in which Mac Odell, Marcia’s husband, was expert. Appreciative inquiry posed questions such as “What do you like best?” “What would ‘better’ look like?” “How could you achieve that?” “What will you do first?” “When?” “Who is responsible?” “How will you know that this has been achieved?” By the end of the appreciative inquiry, the women were already taking their first steps for putting their plans into action. Promoting savings groups is about training a few strong groups (the “positive deviants”) that will become a good example for future replication.

Where did it fall short? While WEP was overall quite inspirational, several practical aspects of its implementation showed room for improvement:

• Dare to be simple: a simpler record-keeping system and a simpler curriculum for training for women’s rights. One group had boiled down the curriculum developed by lawyers into a brief pamphlet with a woman holding an upraised fist on the cover.

• Build on what is there: capitalizing on the desire for women to train each other.

• Better accountability: selecting stronger local NGO partners and holding them more accountable for performance.

We built these insights into the design of Saving for Change.

As Lisa and I interviewed group after group in the sweltering Terai heat, each conversation shattered another of the myths underpinning microfinance program design—myths such as that the poor cannot save and that groups need expert staff to manage loans and that financial independence must begin with a loan.

In my eyes, microfinance had become too complicated, too rigid, too expensive, and too staff-intensive to effectively reach the rural poor. WEP provided a simple but effective alternative.

Marcia’s Story

We traveled back to Katmandu and met Marcia, full of questions about her WEP program design and the decisions that went into it. As we discussed the program details with her, we learned that many of WEP’s most creative aspects were the result of innovations that Marcia, Achyut Hari Aryal (WEP’s microfinance specialist), and many others on Marcia’s staff had developed when presented with obstacles by those who doubted she could accomplish what she set out to do. Like many innovators, Marcia had to take a leap of faith that what she proposed would actually work; she also needed to trust in her colleagues to carry it out.

In 1998, Pact received a $5 million grant from USAID to form microfinance groups. Marcia, as the project’s field director, decided they could use Pact’s existing literacy and other community-based groups to act as a platform for the microfinance project by introducing and linking these existing groups to external credit. Her team conducted a feasibility study that surveyed the one thousand local organizations implementing Pact’s projects in Nepal and concluded that a potential market existed for credit of 350,000 women. She limited this number to those the Asia Foundation had the capacity to train in empowerment and advocacy, a total of 120,000 group members.

She was confident she could reach this number based on two facts. First, Pact was already delivering literacy training through a thousand local Nepalese NGOs, so she knew Pact had the capacity to reach scale. Second, and more importantly, she had learned something interesting about some of these groups. Members of several literacy groups had taken advantage of the regular meetings to do some financial transactions on the side. They had organized themselves into dikutis—a type of ROSCA common in Nepal, to which each member contributed a set amount of money each meeting, in turns taking the total collection from that meeting home with her. In Marcia’s mind, it would not be hard to add on to what the women were already doing.

Without an MFI to provide credit immediately, Marcia figured she could at least start the process and deal with loan capital later. While the groups were waiting to connect to external credit, they operated as savings groups, making loans to one another from the communal pot of weekly savings and sharing interest earned from the loans. Despite Marcia’s best efforts, no MFIs came forward to bring her groups credit. She decided to continue with the plan anyway, forming more and more savings groups independent of MFIs. WEP was born.

Does It Last?

There was one nagging question about WEP, the answer to which I would not learn until years later. Since these groups operated mostly independently, would they survive without WEP’s support? As it turned out, events allowed us to answer this important question. Soon after I completed my evaluation in 2000, USAID withdrew all funding from WEP to invest instead in a hydroelectric project. Within a matter of months, the groups were on their own. In addition, the entire region soon descended into political turmoil as the Terai Valley was taken over by Maoist rebels, and WEP pulled out entirely. When Lisa and I visited these groups, they had told us that if they were on their own they would continue saving and lending because the program was that important to them. Was this true?

Eight years later, Linda Mayoux, an internationally recognized expert on women’s empowerment and microfinance, carried out a study to see whether the groups survived.⁵ They had—a large portion, at least. Of the 6,500 WEP groups in 2000, the 1,500 most promising groups had received substantial additional training in record keeping and management. The study, looking only at these better-trained groups, determined that two-thirds were still saving and lending. Most of us feared that all the groups would have collapsed. The biggest surprise, however, was that the “Sali Coulibalys” of Nepal had trained almost exactly the same number of new groups as the number of older groups that had disbanded—completely on their own initiative. The total number of savings groups had remained steady through eight years of unrest, without NGO support. On top of that, the number of members per group increased by four on average, and the size of the groups’ loan funds quadrupled. The quality of the replicated groups was as high as that of the staff-trained groups. Unfortunately, we did not know the fate of the five thousand groups that received less training. For me, the test of the success of a program is whether it survives over time and becomes embedded into the fabric of how villages resolve the complex problems that beset them. WEP met that test.

India’s Self-Help Groups

As the year that I spent immersed in WEP Nepal wound down in 2002, I began to share the strength of WEP’s savings groups with my microfinance colleagues—a strength that existed not despite but because the groups were never connected to external lenders. Eventually, I recounted the WEP experience to Kim Wilson, a former coworker at Working Capital, the US-focused, peer-lending microfinance project I started in 1990 and managed for almost a decade. Kim was smiling and nodding the whole time, but when I got to the part where I planned to tell her how great an invention this was, she held up her hand. Asset-building savings groups, it seemed, were not unique after all.

Kim, it turned out, was already managing a savings group program of her own with Catholic Relief Services (CRS), as part of a mammoth, diverse, microfinance movement in India, the self-help groups (SHGs). Kim invited me to return with her to northern India to see a different manifestation of savings groups in action.

Kim and a shifting group of CRS staffers took me throughout West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar, Orissa, and Uttar Pradesh provinces on an informal journey to learn about CRS’s work with SHGs. We often traveled all night by train, followed by bone-jarring jeep rides to the villages far away from the rail centers. We slept in parish houses where the Indian priests and nuns who served the region lived. After rice and dal dinners and long talks with the priests late into the night, we would find ourselves startled awake by church bells at five in the morning.

Unlike the orderly WEP meetings, at which we would hold detailed interviews one group at a time, hundreds of people showed up at each stop in India. We did not have the time or resources to arrange the carefully selected interview sampling of a full-scale project evaluation—how were we going to sort out the jaw-dropping prospect of interviewing an entire village? I shouted out my questions to the few people in the front who could hear me (or rather, my translator). From what we could decipher, many in the crowd were enthusiastic about their SHGs. It was a chaotic process and not scientific, but between these gatherings and a few poignant conversations with CRS’s staff, local priests, and leaders of local NGOs, we learned what we needed to know.

The basic methodology of the SHG in India was remarkably similar to that of WEP groups, except that most groups did eventually link with banks to receive loans, which became a larger source of capital for their individual lending than was their own savings pool.

SHGs, I found, were trained and supported by a wide array of local organizations, and this led to substantial differences in how the groups operated. CRS supported small local NGOs to train groups. The Self Help Group-Bank Linkages program promoted by India’s National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) would eventually became by far the world’s largest microfinance initiative. According to Banking on SHGs: Twenty Years On, a recently published book by SHG expert Ajay Tankha, there were ninety-six million SHG members saving and lending in India as of 2012, a figure more than triple the outreach of all the other microfinance initiatives in India.⁶ To put this in perspective, the Microcredit Summit, which tracks MFI outreach, reports that there are some two hundred million microfinance borrowers worldwide.⁷

At 1.2 billion inhabitants, the population of India exceeds that of all the countries of Africa combined, but it was not the size of India that I came to believe was the driver of the success of SHGs. The genius was decentralization. Thousands of different Indian NGOs (and now, increasingly, government agencies) trained the groups, and thousands of different banks—with a bank office for most clusters of villages—made loans to the groups. In this Self Help Group-Bank Linkages model, NGOs did what they do well: they trained people and provided supportive services. The banks did what they do well: they provided and administered loans. The members managed their groups. Both banks and NGOs varied from region to region, so the vast cultural variety in India was met with a variety of service providers.

Like WEP groups, the SHGs I came across in India were hubs of resilience for their members and their villages. One group in particular is etched in my memory. The members used their group meeting to prepare a complete, community-wide disaster response. The same day of their meeting, Vinod Parmeshwar, who later became the deputy director for Saving for Change, and I slipped down a muddy clay trail on foot to meet with a group readying for the monsoon. When we arrived, members were sewing together empty plastic bottles with tightened caps to create makeshift lifejackets, an ingenious if disquieting precaution for the coming flash floods. As rain pelted down on the thatch roof, they showed us the plan they had developed to protect their financial records inside ziplock bags stored with their grain on high ground. They had drawn up a map for an evacuation plan that included assisting elderly villagers to get to safety, too.

What I saw in India reaffirmed my belief that much more can be done at much lower cost by building on what is already in place than through the traditional, centralized microfinance model. The SHG movement in India used this strategy when it built on the services that NGOs were already providing in these communities to organize groups, and then used a well-established and dispersed rural banking system to deliver additional loan capital. In the state of Orissa, for example, a catechist described to me how he trained community members in SHGs at the same time that he performed his usual missionary work teaching people the fundamentals of Catholicism. Given the simplicity of the SHG model, a catechist could become a group trainer. It struck me here as in Nepal that these groups can be trained by volunteers and operate on their own, so long as the model is simple and the goal is to make the groups independent.

Zimbabwe Village Savings and Loan Associations

By this point, I was ready to be involved. I was asked by Oxfam America to direct its Community Finance Department in 2004. To begin, I booked a flight to Zimbabwe.⁸ At Oxfam America’s southern Africa regional office in Harare, local staff were already intrigued by the savings group idea because of the Village Savings and Loan Association (VSLA) program, the international NGO CARE’s major savings group project in the country. CARE Norway’s Moira Eknes is credited with developing the VSLA model in Niger in 1991, building on the tontines in West Africa, when she found herself unable to link the groups to credit or capital. In her words, she “developed the methodology together with the early groups.”⁹ Since then, CARE has expanded the model to thirty-seven countries with 3.7 million group members today.¹⁰ In Zimbabwe, they called the project by the poetic Shona name, Kapufuma Ishungo, roughly meaning “to get wealthy you must persist.”

The director of Kapufuma Ishungo, Alfred Hamadziripi, and I spent more than two weeks traveling from village to village learning everything we could about VSLAs in practice. In 2004, Zimbabwe was notorious for President Robert Mugabe’s political repression and its consequences—the country’s collapsing economy, hyperinflation, and food crisis—as well as for having one of the highest HIV/AIDS rates in the world. In spite of these crises, Zimbabweans remain some of the friendliest and most community-minded people I have met. Zimbabwe is a beautiful, fertile country with a temperate climate. I didn’t miss the heat of Nepal and India.

I found the VSLA methodology very similar to that of the WEP groups in Nepal. Members saved small amounts each week, made loans from their savings, and shared the pool of savings plus interest at regular intervals. Volunteers commonly took it upon themselves to train new groups: it seemed the groups were so obviously successful that demand outpaced CARE’s trainers, who found it efficient to focus on training volunteer trainers in addition to their own work forming groups. For these volunteer-trained groups to keep functioning without NGO staff, they needed to be fully capable of managing themselves. As we visited group after group, what struck us was that the trainers mostly left the groups alone unless they were stymied by a question. Each group had within itself the capacity to function on its own and to use what it had learned to train new groups.

It became clear to me that the impatience of women to join VSLA groups was not in spite of the spiraling financial crisis in Zimbabwe at the time, but because of it. By keeping the funds and decision-making power directly in the hands of the members, particularly over loan length and interest rates, VSLAs were incredibly adaptive to the rapidly deteriorating currency that was erasing savings accounts in mainstream banks and rendering cash kept at home worthless.

When I traveled to Zimbabwe in 2004, inflation was more than 500 percent per year and rising daily. Several years later, inflation rates grew to thousands and then tens of thousands of percent per annum. The government was routinely printing new currency denominations with more zeros tacked on to keep up with its deflating value. Inflation made investments in Zimbabwean dollars worth nothing in foreign exchange, and financial institutions were collapsing. I expected savings groups to be struggling, too. Instead, I found them thriving.

Despite hyperinflation, the VSLA groups were virtually the only functioning financial institutions in the country.¹¹ When inflation was only 500 percent in 2004, the groups had charged a high enough monthly interest rate to maintain something close to equilibrium, so when a loan was repaid, the value of the loan would come close to its value when it had been issued just a month earlier. Even traditional ROSCAs, where for each meeting everyone would bring the same amount of money to be pooled and given as a lump sum to a different member each month, disbanded. The value of the payout for the last person in line would be worthless compared with the payout to the first member.

VSLA group members coped with inflation by maintaining their basic principles but adapting their group’s specific savings amounts and meeting frequency. Groups changed the interest rates on their loans at each meeting. Some shortened loan lengths, as it was no longer sustainable to hold a loan more than a month. As hyperinflation peaked a few years after my study, I learned that savings group members would take out a loan, purchase something in the morning, trade it for a higher price in the afternoon, and pay back the loan by the end of the week. Other groups near the borders transacted in foreign currency. Some groups abandoned currency altogether and calculated loans and loan payments in terms of fast-moving consumer commodities such as bars of soap, cans of oil, and sacks of rice and maize. Groups accepted the Botswana pula and the South Africa rand even before the government began transacting in foreign currency. As transportation costs soared, groups used their collective purchasing power to send one person to buy in bulk, financing profitable cross-border trading.

I was struck by the inventiveness that group members employed to protect their assets, especially under conditions by which regulated institutions were unable to adapt quickly enough. With timely access to flexible loans that changed as often as the circumstances, VSLA members maintained their small businesses. The group members could better manage to buy food and other essentials without resorting to selling such productive assets as seeds, plows, animals, and even land, a process that had many of Zimbabwe’s poorest spiraling into deeper poverty the next farming cycle because they had sold what they needed to farm with.

I also saw that savings groups such as VSLAs helped ease another crisis in Zimbabwe. At one meeting, I watched a woman stand up and proclaim she was HIV-positive to a mixed group of people with and without HIV. Her fellow group members cheered. The woman displayed extraordinary courage, I thought, because at the time (and to this day) there was a harsh stigma toward people who were HIV-positive, in Zimbabwe and in much of the world. At the time, before antiretroviral drugs became prevalent, people died quickly from AIDS. I learned that the casket maker had one of the few bustling businesses in the village.

The CARE organizers reached out to people with HIV/AIDS, initiating savings groups such as VSLAs to enable people to support themselves. The groups helped people with AIDS start trading businesses because these businesses required much less physical effort than farming, and that allowed people to still be productive even as they became sick. I watched a VSLA meeting in one village where each member contributed to a common fund so that when one of the members died of AIDS, they could have a decent funeral.

Back in Harare, Alfred Hamadziripi told me his project’s story.¹² It sounded familiar. The Kapufuma Ishungo program in Zimbabwe began in 1999 and quickly trained 272 groups, with the promise that the groups would soon be linked to a matching fund. To Alfred’s dismay, as soon as the first groups received their loans, they stopped saving and meeting and eventually defaulted. CARE scrapped its matching fund program and three-quarters of the groups immediately disbanded; the groups that were left were reeling and disappointed, hoping that a grant was eventually headed their way. The CARE staff revamped their program, this time with the requirement that each group would mobilize its own savings fund for loans and there would be no external capital. Starting with the handful of groups still functioning, Kapufuma Ishungo spread across the country, urged on by the wild success of savings groups to navigate hyperinflation. It turned out to be as true in Nepal and India as in Zimbabwe: the fundamental principle was to keep it simple, and no handouts.

Based on the success of CARE’s VSLA project in Zimbabwe and the presence of the CARE team to provide training, we decided to start Oxfam’s first savings group program in Zimbabwe. We enlisted the Zimbabwe Adult Learner’s Association (ZALA) to start a VSLA-type program, pairing the savings groups with their literacy work as Marcia Odell did in Nepal. We gave a grant to ZALA for their work on the pilot project, but we found ourselves caught by Zimbabwe’s rapid financial descent. ZALA had converted the grant money immediately into Zimbabwean dollars, so it lost its value so quickly that once staff were trained, no funds were left for implementation. Oxfam’s—and my—first savings group program was a disaster.

Fortunately, Oxfam let me try again.