Foreword: Frances Moore Lappé

Frances Moore Lappé is the cofounder of the Small Planet Institute and author of eighteen books, including Diet for a Small Planet and, most recently, EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want.

I’ll bet most of us wouldn’t expect a book about savings groups in developing countries to shake up our ideas about the human condition and our sense of possibility for our world. I didn’t—but that’s just what this fascinating book has done for me.

My curiosity was first piqued in learning of the meteoric rise of savings groups: in the world’s poorest countries, in just six years, membership in village-level savings groups has leaped from one million to ten million members. If there were a speed record among global social movements, the rise of savings groups may have broken it. Remarkably, much of this speed reflects the work of villagers voluntarily teaching other villagers, with only minimal donor help.

For several decades, I’ve been convinced that a primary cause of many of our worldwide problems in poverty and development is a lack of vision of what can work. Without a believable vision of where we want to go, we feel defeated and powerless.

That’s serious. Since solutions to all our biggest problems, from poverty to climate change, are known or just around the corner, I’ve come to feel there’s really just one problem we should be most worried about: the spreading sense of powerlessness to manifest what we already know.

In Their Own Hands helps me refocus my energies to this end.

Jeffrey Ashe appropriately warns us that, “joining a savings group will not lift many out of poverty.” Savings groups are no panacea. What comes clear to me in this eye-opening book is that the movement indeed touches the taproot. In the people we meet in this book, I see the beginning of self-organizing power to meet three deep human needs: for connection, for meaning, and for power itself—power understood as our capacity to create and make an imprint.

Powerlessness means feeling vulnerable, dependent, and alone. Savings groups address each of these. They enable members to become more resilient in the face of poverty’s assaults—as loans can be used not only to get you through a poor harvest but to purchase supplies for your small business or help if a family member develops malaria or HIV/AIDS. The groups build trusting connections as members create and enforce rules together, and they offer meaning as members enjoy the experience of directly helping one another succeed.

The stories you will read here bury the myth that poor people have too little to save, that expert staff must manage loans, and that financial independence begins with a loan. We learn what might have seemed obvious but apparently has not been: starting a self-help initiative with a loan, i.e. debt, increases one’s sense of vulnerability. “Debt equals stress,” Ashe reminds us. Starting with savings does the opposite.

If this book’s message feels far from the lives of those in developed countries, think again. So many people in the North feel they are victims of a globalizing corporate banking elite, speeding the stream of wealth to the very top. In contrast, all the gains stay close to home in the simple system of savings groups. The control is with the village women, not with moneylenders or bankers.

I believe the qualities that define successful societies are distributed power, transparency in human relationships, and cultures of mutual accountability. Such characteristics make possible what I call “living democracies,” everyday cultures of democracy that support life. What astonishes me, as I read In Their Own Hands, is that the savings group movement embodies each of these qualities. They are the “nano” versions.

Not many who write about revolutions have experienced one. Ashe’s internal “rethink” of the microfinance system led directly to the writing of this book. For twenty years, Ashe explains, he worked in the microfinance movement where local people are not in control. After being a leader in a field for so long, few would have the courage to see, much less acknowledge, a better way and change course.

Ashe’s core paradigm shift, which he loves to repeat with a smile, is “They know how.” Most aid interventions collapse as soon as outsiders leave, he notes, but the savings group approach transfers some very basic tools and gets out of the way. It enables people to tap into their own ingenuity, determination, and creativity. So it lasts, and it spreads.

“We are on the verge of a revolution in development, where savings groups are just the starting point,” Ashe writes. He could be right. Revolutions aren’t necessarily noisy, in-your-face disturbances. This quiet and virtually invisible one begins on the inside, and its premise and practice are so incredibly simple that one could easily miss its power. Reading this book, you will not run that risk.