savings account | villagefinance

Posts Tagged ‘savings account’

The Elephant in the Microfinance Room

Posted in Microfinance, tagged savings account on February 9, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Last month, CGAP hosted an international virtual conference on multiple borrowing and over-indebtedness. The conference generated a list of potential solutions to the problem — which did not include the delivery of safe, flexible savings services.

Why is no one acknowledging how important it is to offer quality savings accounts to poor people to reduce overindebtedness? Is it that some people at the forum genuinely have no idea what it would be like to have to pay for: their children’s primary education (more…)

Read Full Post »

Rural Market Failure — Governance

Posted in Microfinance, The village, tagged governance, orality, savings account, trust, village finance on January 13, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Savings bank in Cambodia. Keeping the savings promise is about far more than record-keeping.

Poor villages remain out of reach of many essential microfinance products. This is not a product development problem; it is a chronic and agonizing market failure resulting from a failure in the governance of microfinance transactions.

Oliver Williamson writes that “[a] governance structure is usefully thought of (more…)

Read Full Post »

A 4th Cycle Savings Association in Zanzibar

Posted in Village institutions, tagged ROSCA, savings account, time value of money, transparency, VSLA, Zanzibar on September 29, 2011| 5 Comments »

This group has been operating since 2006.

There are now many mature Village Savings & Loan Associations. Where are they going? What do they look like?

Mwanzo Mgumu is a 4^th cycle association (originally incubated by CARE) in southern Zanzibar. The day we visited (on assignment with the Financial Sector Deepening Trust), 15 members were attending of all ages; 12 were women. This cycle they will meet weekly for 2 years.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

Expecting the Best

Posted in Microfinance, Orality, tagged counting, Daniel Kish, India, microfinance, numeracy, savings account, tally on June 24, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Bridging the gap between tallies and modern counting.

Daniel Kish has been blind since he was two. He taught himself physical navigation using ‘echolocation’. When he clicks his tongue the departing and returning sound waves tell him what objects and surfaces are nearby. He now teaches blind people echolocation at his non-profit, World Access for the Blind.

Kish’s mother taught him to expect a normal life, and not to take his limitations as fate. His method works by tapping the strengths of blind people instead of reminding them of their limitations.

We could expect villagers to live normal lives too, but in microfinance we don’t. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Saving is Freedom

Posted in Microfinance, Village institutions, tagged charity, emergencies, expense, farm, medicine, savings account, school, Stuart Rutherford, trust on April 19, 2011| 1 Comment »

In 2001 I outlined a proposal to a large charity to deliver savings to Cambodian villagers. The British director was quiet until I finished, when he announced: “there is only one difficulty with this proposal. Villagers don’t have any money – they are too poor to save.”

It’s been a decade since the publication of The Poor and Their Money, Stuart Rutherford’s classic rebuttal of this impoverished — and impoverishing — idea. But in development practice it lingers – as silent and influential as a racial prejudice — in our institutions and our thinking.

If you talk to villagers, don’t ask them if they save. (more…)

Read Full Post »

villagefinance

Re-inventing village finance!

Posts Tagged ‘savings account’

The Elephant in the Microfinance Room

Rural Market Failure — Governance

A 4th Cycle Savings Association in Zanzibar

Expecting the Best

Saving is Freedom

Email Subscription

Topics

Blogroll

Links

Archives

A Cloud in the Village Sky