Entry 2: May 2007: Village Savings and Loan Associations
From: Stuart Rutherford
A
new research survey* indicates success for Village Savings and Loan
Associations in Zanzibar. I am always excited about good news on
VS&Ls because they illustrate one of the Poor and Their Money messages - that time-bound savings clubs can work well, showing that sustainability plus permanance are
a strategy used by certain kinds of providers rather than essential
features of money management services . Page 44 of The Poor and Their Money points
out how useful it is to savings clubs if they close on a named date: at
that time members either get their savings back, along with interest
earned, or they don`t. If they do, so much the better, and they may
start up another round. If they don`t, at least they now know that the
club has failed, and they make sure they don`t team up with that set of
people again. Bad though that is, it is much better than staying
long-term with a savings club or MFI or a co-operative or bank, only to
discover, much too late, that the institution has failed. I`m glad to
see that the VS&L movement has chosen to use the phrase that I
coined to describe the process of closing the books and returning
assets to members - the `action audit`. VS&Ls show the strong attraction to poor people of building savings over a defined timespan.
*The survey is called `Village Savings and Loan Associations – experience from Zanzibar` by EZRA ANYANGO, EZEKIEL ESIPISU, LYDIA OPOKU, SUSAN JOHNSON, MARKKU MALKAMAKI and CHRIS MUSOKE and will appear shortly in the journal Small Enterprise Development. To find out more about VS&Ls, go to www.vsla.net
Entry 1: May 2007: Welcome to the website
From: Stuart Rutherford
Welcome to
this new web site. Please use it to join the discussion about how best
to provide basic money-management services to the world`s poor. |
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