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Archive for the ‘VSLA’ Category

A cluster of VSLAs in rural Rwanda. Clustering expands the market for governance, and enhances opportunities to ‘rewire’ networks.

The heart of VSLA is ‘time-limitation.’ The time-limitation feature is typically understood as an ‘action audit’ – a way for members to manage risk by giving them an opportunity to say “show me my money.”

A recent study of human cooperation[1] gives us a fresh look at time-limitation. There have been many doubts raised about cooperation: in particular due to the effect of so-called ‘free-riders,’ who exploit its benefits without contributing to its successes. However, (more…)

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No 'village bank' for us!

NGO projects often discourage villagers from joining more than VSLA or other savings association. Why?

While consulting with MicroSave in 2008 I visited Mazarpara village in Lower Assam with Abhijit Sharma of the Indian Institute of Bank Management (Guwahati). In this economically active but poor village near Guwahati ‘accumulating savings and credit associations’ (ASCAs) started over 3 decades ago. The average household (among 72) held investments (more…)

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At the Arusha Savings Group Summit, Bram Thuysbaert (Yale) and Beniamino Savonitto from Innovations for Poverty Action presented early evidence from a 2-year study of the impact of CARE’s savings associations (VSLAs) in Uganda, using randomized control trials. The results were unexpected.

The study compared ‘treatment’ villages where savings associations had been formed with ‘control’ villages where they had not. Conference delegates were told that members’ investments (more…)

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