MicroBanks
Zimele Savings Group
The Savings Program currently targets mothers and grandmothers who are often heads of households due to the death of a parent from the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Mothers and grandmothers are more likely to pass on economic benefits to their children and grandchildren, which make them the natural target for the savings program.
The Savings Program’s self-help approach involves 3 phases concentrating on social, economic and political empowerment. This approach provides an environment of growth and enables the participants to step up from an empoverished surrounding towards a life of dignity. The Zimele staff provides training, guidance and continual mentoring throughout each of the following 3 phases:
Phase 1. Establish Savings Groups
Each savings group consists of roughly 8-12 women who are trained in 8 modules covering personal finance as well as comunications. The women learn life changing savings habits and also learn how to make key financial decisions for their households. In weekly meetings, each participant brings their weekly savings amount and records are kept of every contribution. Each participant can also take a loan against their savings to pay for entreprenuerial efforts or personal needs such as tuition for their children. Each group can also decide to take a group loan to start a group venture such as a community farm.
As of 2009, roughly 40 savings groups are active with a total of 500+ participants. The 500+ participants are impacting over 4000+ lives since each holdhold is typically 8-10 people. Zimele closely monitors the performance of each group and provides additional training when necessary.
Phase 2 – Form Cluster Level Associations
Within one community, multiple savings groups may be active and when these groups achieve a level of self sufficiency, Zimele provides training to create Cluster Level Associations (CLA’s). Typically each CLA consists of 10 savings groups where each group elects 2 representatives. The representatives at the CLA level then meet to address community needs, network, share best practices, and provide women a collective voice within the community. For example, one CLA identified a need for a children’s daycare center to allow parents to work. They created a daycare center hiring a teacher and enrolling children in the community.
Phase 3 – Create a Federation
Once CLA’s are firmly established and operating for a period of time, Zimele assists in combining 8-10 CLA’s into a Federation and looks towards allowing the Federation to operate indepedently or only providing support when necessary.
Our Progress So Far
Since January we have added 20+ savings groups to bring us to a total of 40+ active savings groups with a total of 500+ program participants. 98% of the participants are women with children. The total impact is over 4000 people.
Every group completed our 8 module workshop training program. Our staff conducted refresher training for selected groups in August.
Through their participation in program the women have not only developed life changing savings habits, but through their participation in meetings they are developing a sense of social empowerment as they learn to trust non family community members, learn decision making skills, and become financial contributors to their families.
The savings groups so far have issued a total of 233 loans. Participants have used these loans to pay for their children’s education, and to start or grow small businesses such as grocery stores, used clothing shops, hairdressers, bakeries, and craft businesses.
The savings group launch effort was so successful, that we were able to accelerate the timeline to move into the 2nd phase of the program which is the development of Cluster Level Associations (CLA) for the purpose of bringing women together to discuss and implement solutions to meet larger community needs and become politically active within their communities.
