Posted in Financial cooperatives, Microfinance, tagged SACCO, saving, school on November 21, 2011| 1 Comment »
Arusha Women's Market. Villagers save at home from one harvest to the next, losing a lot of their savings.
The second afternoon of a three-day strategic planning workshop for a rural credit union in Kilimanjaro region. Five board members and the manager have just completed a pilot market survey in their village. Their board room is spacious and airy – though one wall is missing, and a kid goat sits comfortably under the manager’s chair.
They report back on what they have learned.
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…)
villagefinance 