ASSESSING THE PERFORMANCE OF SAVING FOR CHANGE IN MALI

In 2006, the local Saving for Change team in Mali—including representatives from Oxfam America, Freedom from Hunger, and the Strømme Foundation, our donor and collaborator in identifying initial partners—and I carried out the first assessment of Saving for Change. This assessment was a chance to see how—and if—Saving for Change actually worked for its members. I had managed and evaluated dozens of programs before, but it is different when you are checking on your own initiative, especially when it is new and unorthodox. I felt a little nervous as the plane touched down in Bamako, Mali’s capital.

Mali, one of the poorest countries in the world, is a land-locked country in West Africa, with its northern half firmly planted in the Sahara Desert, and its southern part, where we implemented the Saving for Change training, in the semiarid Sahel. The team climbed into a program vehicle, left Bamako, and drove through a flat plateau of scrub grasses dotted with intermittent, colossal baobab trees. We left the main road and veered sharply onto a rutted, rocky dirt track. Two hours later, we came upon the cluster of mud houses that marked the first village stop on our ten-day assessment trip.

We exchanged appropriate greetings with village leaders and staff of the local NGO (trained by the Oxfam America and Freedom from Hunger team), and then the savings group meeting began. I followed along as best I could, knowing the general order of business and receiving a few helpful whispered translations from Mariame Coulibaly, a local Saving for Change staffer who worked for the Strømme Foundation.

The women repeated their bylaws in unison, as they did every week. The officers took attendance, opened the cashbox, and reported the total to the members—it had to be the same as when the box was closed at the end of the last meeting, ensuring that no transactions occurred during the week. Once the women had each contributed their savings and earlier loans from the fund were repaid, the secretary announced the new total in the cashbox. The group president then asked if anyone wanted to request a loan. A few placed one of their sandals in front of them or raised their hands to indicate they did, and a lively discussion ensued, with the borrowers explaining how the loans would be used and the rest of the group debating the likelihood they would be repaid. By the end of the meeting, most of money in the box was loaned out.

As the discussion wrapped up, the trainer from the local NGO carrying out Saving for Change in this region, the “animator,” led us to a meal prepared by one of the groups. I assumed we would be getting back into the car to head to the next village after lunch, but instead the animator brought us to watch another group meeting in another part of the village. When that meeting finished, she had us wait to attend a third, and then a fourth. As another efficiently run Saving for Change meeting unfolded before me, I was concerned. Had the animator we had contracted with through the local NGO to seed savings groups in twenty nearby villages merely stayed put, thoroughly organizing this one place at the expense of all the others?

It turned out that this village had eleven Saving for Change groups, with a combined membership of about 250 women. It was an impressive number. I interrupted a conversation transpiring in Bambara between the Malian staff and the animator before she took us to sit through another meeting. She assured me that she had indeed trained groups in surrounding villages, as she had been expected to do. In fact, the animator had organized only one group in this village. The rest of the groups were trained by Salimata Coulibaly.

Salimata, or Sali, was the president of the first Saving for Change group in the village. Unlike most of the women there, Sali attended school up to the eighth grade. She ran a small kiosk selling necessities such as matches, salt, sugar, and tea. Sali was small, lean, and intense. She wore glasses and a tightly tied hijab wrapped around her face, which contrasted with the flowing scarves and head wraps that most other women wore. Sali was all business. I had been impressed with how smoothly she directed her group. I was more impressed as I realized that she had cultivated that same impeccable order in ten more.

“How did you do it?” I asked Sali through a translator. She explained that it was not so difficult; she simply repeated each weekly lesson the animator taught her group as it formed, reviewing with ten other groups how to choose members, elect officers, craft bylaws, and keep records. Sali would meet with each of the ten groups she organized in turn and pass on what she had learned.

“Why did you do it?” I asked. A year later a group making a video that featured Sali asked her this same question. She answered:

I want better development for my village. The women trust me a lot. That’s why they always come to me for advice. It is with great joy that I share my knowledge with them. I would like to have this program reach everyone. There are some villages that have not been reached. I would really, really want to have these women receive the learning we have received.

During that first assessment, Sali took us to task, saying we needed to do a better job teaching the women to keep records. Since most of the women in her groups were illiterate, Sali explained, they ask their husbands to step in and handle record keeping. Sali declared, “Sooner or later, the men will steal from us.” We took this request to heart and later introduced a record-keeping system based entirely on oral recall so that groups without a single literate member could keep their own records.

The groups Sali Coulibaly organized were, to my eye, equal to those groups created by the animator, a trained and paid NGO staff member. I began to believe that even at this early stage we were on the right track. Our vision was that some group members would volunteer to train new groups in their villages within two years, as I had seen elsewhere. Having volunteers train and support the groups is the cornerstone of both controlling costs and ensuring that the groups continue beyond the scope of the project. The volunteers live in the village, but the paid staff will soon go on to another village. Within months after the first group was formed in her village, Sali was training new groups with no special guidance or training from Saving for Change.

If Sali had taken it upon herself to organize groups in her village, perhaps other leaders were training groups in their villages. I asked her supervisor what the animator team had told him about groups replicating spontaneously. He said that while Sali was unique in the number of groups she had trained, he knew of several other volunteer replicators who had each already trained a group or two. The next day, in a new village a half-day’s drive away, Fatoumata Traoré, an animator from another local NGO, reported that she too knew of many villages where group leaders were training groups.

Nine years later, we know that of the 18,700 groups in place in Mali today, volunteers trained well over half of them. We now incorporate volunteers, whom we came to call “replicating agents,” as an integral part of our strategy. What emerged on its own in a few villages that first year with a little extra training and encouragement (and no payment), we were able to duplicate in thousands of villages.

Sali Coulibaly saw something in Saving for Change that inspired her to teach the idea to her peers. Her story was emblematic of the underlying ethos we tried to build into Saving for Change: ownership. Each group was managed by its members, using their own money to build assets collectively that they could access throughout the year in the form of loans. Annually, dividends that included their year-long savings and the interest garnered from the loans were distributed back to the members. Our theory was that if members owned and operated the groups, members could adapt their groups to fit their specific financial needs. We hoped this would lead members to value the groups as a resource so much that they would decide to share their knowledge with others. Sali manifested this hope tenfold.

The savings group practitioners, operating quietly in the rural backwaters of the world’s poorest countries, are demonstrating that what is needed is a disciplined commitment to savings.

Savings groups are not the end point, only a beginning. We are on the verge of a savings group revolution.