Notes
Introduction
1. OECD, “Aid disbursements to countries and regions.”
2. Rutherford and Arora, The Poor and Their Money, 41–42.
3. US CIA, The World Factbook.
4. Allen, “Savings Groups Global Outreach.”
5. Vinod Parmeshwar, who was to become my deputy director and who took the lead on developing the systems that ensured that the program ran smoothly, and Mamadou Biteye, who was then in charge of Oxfam America’s programming in West Africa and who was later to direct the regional office for West Africa for Oxfam America and later Oxfam Great Britain. Kathleen Stack along with Edouine François of Freedom from Hunger, Vinod, and Mamadou trained the local staff. Freedom from Hunger and Oxfam jointly developed the training manuals and training protocols.
6. Coulibaly, “Saving for Change.”
7. Salimata Coulibaly interview.
Chapter 2
1. “Solidarity, or benkadi, is a widespread term used in Mali (and by far the most common name chosen by Savings groups).” BARA and IPA, Final Impact Evaluation, 119. Benkadi directly translates to “togetherness is sweet.”
2. Approximate currency conversions from 2012–13.
3. “Oral accounting has been a successful mechanism to assure transparency for all members, and allows for financial management by the group even when more complex systems such as multiple shares are introduced.” BARA and IPA, Baseline Study of Saving for Change in Mali, 15.
4. Several sources discuss this contrasting aspect of emergency loans. They are not private, because members must ask their group for money. However, they are more discreet (and reliable) than begging or asking family, and many members value this aspect of Saving for Change very highly. See, for example, Bermudez and Matuszeski, Ensuring Continued Success, 15–16.
5. BARA and IPA, Baseline Study of Saving for Change in Mali, 86.
6. “Women perceive Saving for Change as a buffer against shock. Loans are occasionally used for consumption emergencies and emergency loans are in fact prioritized by the group and in many cases are repaid without interest.” BARA, Operational Evaluation of Saving for Change in Mali, vii.
7. “For many women, the mere presence of a program that validates their economic struggles and establishes a buffer against risk is enough in itself to motivate them toward savings and credit where previous systems did not.” BARA and IPA, Baseline Study of Saving for Change in Mali, 16.
8. “Most households of any type will run out of the most important staples (millet, sorghum and rice) at some point during the year.” BARA and IPA, Baseline Study of Saving for Change in Mali, 64.
9. “Husbands of members also assist members with loan reimbursement under certain conditions, such as sickness or business failure, that disable a member from repaying her debt.” BARA, Operational Evaluation of Saving for Change in Mali, 51.
10. “While many women take loans for petty enterprises and commerce, they tend to co-mingle the profits. These enterprises are thus frequently decapitalized as funds are diverted to meet immediate household needs. While this leads to a pattern of repeated loans to sustain the same activity, such activities rarely grow under these conditions. Even in areas where Saving for Change has had a longstanding presence, women are by and large taking out loans for the same activities as when they began the program. The few women we observed who have been able to realize transformative economic growth through Saving for Change enjoyed relative wealth and stability before the program arrived.” BARA and IPA, Baseline Study of Saving for Change in Mali, 89.
11. Description of the animator’s role and the training program drawn from Parmeshwar interview and Freedom from Hunger and Oxfam America, Saving for Change Formation of Savings Groups: Animator’s Guide.
12. BARA and IPA, Final Impact Evaluation, 13.
13. “The two keys to group survival are women’s confidence in themselves and in the group, and their willingness to make things work. Confidence comes from knowing Saving for Change content; having a capable individual—committee member or RA—to guide the group; and/or experiencing an extended period without animator visits … Women’s willingness to make things work reflects their motivation, optimism and excitement about the program.” Bermudez and Matuszeski, Ensuring Continued Success, 6 (emphasis in original).
14. US Global Health Initiative, “Mali.”
15. The process for identifying and training replicators is drawn from interviews with animators and replicating agents, February 7–8, 2013, in Kebila and Faragouran, Mali.
Chapter 3
1. United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the US government’s bilateral aid agency.
2. Ashe and Parrott, Pact’s WEP in Nepal, 6.
3. Achyut Hari Aryal interview.
4. Roodman, Due Diligence, 119. This ratio refers to group solidarity lending models. For all types of microfinance, the staff-to-loan ratio ranges from 238 staff per individual loan to 306 staff per “village banking” style loan.
5. Mayoux, Women Ending Poverty.
6. Tankha, Banking on SHGs, 35; Srinivasan, Microfinance India, 3.
7. Maes and Reed, State of the Microcredit Campaign Report 2012, 3.
8. Nageeb Sumar assisted with this project.
9. Helmore, “Revisiting the Early Days of CARE’s Savings Groups,” 61.
10. Allen, “Savings Groups Global Outreach.”
11. Hamadziripi interview.
12. Ibid.
Chapter 4
1. Biteye interview.
2. For more information on the Strømme Foundation, see http://Strommestiftelsen.no/english.
3. Romana, “Saving for Change in Mali.”
4. BARA and IPA, Final Impact Evaluation, 59.
5. Howard, “Mali’s 2.5 Percent Problem.”
6. UNDP, “GII: Gender Inequality Index, value.”
7. UNICEF, “Mali Statistics.”
8. Ibid.
9. UNDP Mali, “Promouvoir l’égalité des sexes.”
10. IPU, “Women in National Parliaments.”
11. The gendered division of labor and financial roles in Mali is well documented. See, for example, Creevey, Women Farmers in Africa.
12. BARA and IPA, Baseline Study of Saving for Change in Mali, 77.
13. Romana, “Saving for Change in Mali.”
14. Rutherford and Arora, The Poor and Their Money, 39, 2.
15. Ibid., 12.
16. Collins et al, Portfolios of the Poor, 4.
17. Ibid., 174–5.
18. BARA and IPA, Final Impact Evaluation, 11.
19. Ruberg, Saving for Change in Mali, 20.
20. The acronym CAEB stands for Conseil et Appui pour l’Éducation à la Base in French, meaning “Counsel and Advice for Education for All.”
21. Kathleen Stack took the lead for Freedom from Hunger, along with Susan Grove, a graduate student from the microfinance course I taught at Columbia University.
22. Parmeshwar interview.
23. bavois interview.
24. Ibid.
25. White, “Depoliticizing Development,” 61.
26. There was a tension between the need for skilled facilitators with the capacity to tease input and ideas out of their trainees and the ultimate goal of making training itself so accessible and easy that group members would feel empowered to train new groups. The solution was counterintuitive: we needed to lay out a fully scripted, participatory dialogue, said marc bavois. “We give people a formula [that] replaces the capacity of the trainer to actually facilitate.” The Saving for Change manual would walk trainers through each step of leading an active discussion, question by question, prompt by prompt. A standardized learning conversation would ensure that every training created space for diversity and experimentation in each group: inexperienced trainers could copy this dialogue instead of copying a rigid set of group rules. From bavois interview.
27. Dunford, “Field Agents Matter, Too.”
28. Parmeshwar interview.
29. Traoré interview.
30. Samake interview.
31. Salimata Coulibaly interview.
32. Hugh Allen, the CEO of VSL Associates, a consortium of savings group practitioners, continues to help craft the VSLA model. He shared with me a fascinating commentary on written records: with passbooks, he said, “It occurred to me that ledgers are an intellectual construct in which facts are translated into an abstract form so that results can be calculated. But most poor people have enough confidence in the system that they do not need to be reassured by a constant (and usually inaccurate) re-calculation. Passbooks are very concrete and visual, with their stamps, which is somehow closer to the way in which people in villages construct reality. What they see and hear is more powerful than what is rendered only abstract as a set of results. So passbooks work everywhere except when there are very low levels of literacy. … In Mali the oral system has broken the mold for an illiterate target group.” Allen interview.
33. BARA and IPA, Baseline Study of Saving for Change in Mali, 39.
34. Parmeshwar interview.
35. Ibid.
36. Lamine Coulibaly interview.
37. Traoré interview.
38. Parmeshwar interview.
39. BARA and IPA, Final Impact Evaluation, 61–62.
40. Oxfam America, “Saving for Change FY14 Outlook,” 1.
41. Basenji Coulibaly interview.
42. Lamine Coulibaly interview.
43. Bagayoga interview.
Chapter 5
1. El Salvador Country Leadership Team, Joint Strategy of Oxfam International in El Salvador, 5.
2. Oslin, Saving for Change in El Salvador, 5; US CIA, “El Salvador”; El Salvador Country Leadership Team, Joint Strategy of Oxfam International in El Salvador, 8.
3. Sostowski and Maravilla, Estudio de Factibilidad, 23.
4. Ibid., 11.
5. UNODC, “UNODC Homicide Statistics.”
6. Sostowski and Maravilla, Estudio de Factibilidad, 5.
7. In Spanish, CCR is known as the Coordinadora de Comunidades para el Desarrollo de Chalatenango. The acronym is derived from its former name, the Comité Coordinador para las Reptriaciones, which reflects the organization’s original mandate to protect the rights of returning formerly displaced people and rebuilding the community after the civil war.
8. Devietti and Matuszeski, Saving for Change Program Assessment, 19.
9. Ibid., 20.
10. Ibid., 11.
11. Ibid., 207.
12. Ibid., 176.
13. Ibid., 150.
14. Ibid., 151.
15. Allen, “Savings Groups Global Outreach.”
16. Alas, Programa de Ahorro y préstamo comunitario El Salvador y Guatemala, 137–65.
17. Ibid., 144.
18. Ibid., 159–65.
19. Ibid., 218–19.
20. Ibid., 219.
21. Ibid., 172–73.
22. Ibid., 168.
23. Ibid., 156.
24. Ibid.
25. Devietti et al., Saving for Change in Guatemala Baseline, 3.
26. Guatemala Country Leadership Team, Guatemala, 3.
27. Manz, Paradise in Ashes, 21.
28. UN WFP, “Guatemala: Overview.”
29. Devietti and Harrison, Feasibility Study Literature Review, 2.
30. US CIA, “Guatemala.”
31. Rodriguez, Bringing Saving for Change to Guatemala, 2.
32. Ibid., 11–12.
33. Devietti et al., Saving for Change in Guatemala Baseline, 25.
34. Ibid., 23–4.
35. Alas, Programa de Ahorro y préstamo comunitario El Salvador y Guatemala, 83–91.
36. Name removed to protect identity.
37. Alas, Programa de Ahorro y préstamo comunitario El Salvador y Guatemala, 35–39.
38. Musalo, Pellegrin, and Roberts, “Crimes without Punishment.”
39. Ibid., 170.
40. Alas, Programa de Ahorro y préstamo comunitario El Salvador y Guatemala, 9–21.
41. Ibid., 83–91.
42. Name changed to protect identity.
43. Alas, Programa de Ahorro y préstamo comunitario El Salvador y Guatemala, 68–71.
44. Ibid., 9–21.
45. Ibid.
46. Ashe, Trip Report, 5.
47. Name changed to protect identity.
Chapter 6
1. Ashe, Saving for Change, 6.
2. Further details and in-depth analysis on the hypotheses, methodology, data, and results of the impact evaluation described in this chapter appear at length in BARA and IPA, Final Impact Evaluation.
3. For a thorough literature review of impact studies on microfinance, see Roodman, Due Diligence, 153–71.
4. BARA and IPA, Final Impact Evaluation, 113–14.
5. Ibid., 43.
6. Chambers, foreword to Seasons of Hunger, xxi.
7. Devereux, Vaitla, and Swan, Seasons of Hunger, 21.
8. BARA and IPA, Final Impact Evaluation, 36, 51, 52.
9. Ibid., 92.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 52.
12. Ibid., 109.
13. Biteye interview.
14. BARA and IPA, Final Impact Evaluation, 15.
15. Ibid., 112.
16. Ibid., 112–13.
17. Ibid.
18. Diakité interview.
19. Edwards, Saving for Change in Mali, 4.
20. Ibid., 7.
21. Ruberg, Saving for Change in Mali, 20.
22. Edwards, Saving for Change in Mali, 5.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 41–45.
26. Traoré interview.
27. Ibid.
Chapter 7
1. Bateman and Brochardt, “Brazil’s Lessons in Rural Development.”
2. Ibid., 15.
3. Ibid., 17.
4. Rippey and Fowler, “Beyond Financial Services.”
5. Freedom from Hunger, “Microfinance and Health Protection.”
6. Rippey and Nelson. “Beyond Financial Services.”
7. Bunch, Two Ears of Corn.
8. Bunch, “Africa’s Soil Fertility Crisis.”
9. Polack and Warwick, The Business Solution to Poverty, 197.
10. Sogoba interview.
11. Hamadziripi interview.
12. Mayoux, “Women Ending Poverty.”
13. Savings Groups Information Exchange.
14. Ibid.
15. Mine, et al., “Post-Project Replication of Savings Groups in Uganda.”
16. Anyango, et al., “Village Savings and Loan Associations.”
17. Mayoux, “Women Ending Poverty.”
18. Proaño, Gash, and Kuklewicz, “Durability of Savings Group Programmes.”
19. Alas, Programa de Ahorro y préstamo comunitario El Salvador y Guatemala, 118–32.
20. Oxfam America, “International savings groups NGOs aim for 50 million members by 2020.”
21. Shin interview.
22. The Savings and Internal Lending Communities (SILCs) program pioneered by CRS uses the Private Service Provider (PSP) model to fund up to one year of training of community agents who will continue to provide SILCs training and support at a fee after the funding from CRS, through a local implementing organization. This provides sustainability and continuity and also ensures that the services provided by the trainers address local market needs for savings and lending requirements.
23. Rippey and Wanjau, “No More Tears.”
24. Wilson, “Jipange Sasa,” 99–107.