Microfinance Practice: RE: [MFP] Re: Fwd: FW: Unbanked News

Here you are Paul. Can you out something on the page that says that if anyone wants to update this they should just send me their numbers, and say that we'll be putting up a user-managed page on thesavix.org where people can post their own data sometime towards the end of the year.

From: MicrofinancePractice@yahoogroups.com [mailto:MicrofinancePractice@yahoogroups.com]
Sent: 11 July 2014 05:56
To: Jeff Ashe
Cc: MicrofinancePractice@yahoogroups.com; sclapray@brandeis.edu
Subject: Re: [MFP] Re: Fwd: FW: Unbanked News - South Africa

Jeff, thanks for the plug for Savings Revolution, and I'm happy when someone calls it the best single source of information about Savings Groups.

But - we don't have Hugh's list of country by country statistics - If Hugh would like to post it on Savings Rev, that would be great, but that's his baby.

Paul

On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 6:58 PM, <jaashe@aol.com> wrote:

Dick and Colleagues,

The best single source of savings groups can be found at savings-revolution.org. There you will find the country by country statistics on savings group outreach that Hugh has collected - at least 8,000,000 members in Africa along, most of the current research, manuals, blog posts for this fast growing field. The program I designed until March 2013 directed for Oxfam America/Freedom from Hunger reached 450,000 women in 5,000 villages in Mali alone. Half of these groups were trained by community volunteers. This entire effort was carried out by a team that for three years totaled 206 NGO staff with a much smaller staff today. The ratio of members to staff reached 1/2,000 during the expansion stage but is not abut 1/7,000 with volunteers training new groups. Of course all the savings the profits from lending and income from fines and collective activities are shared out at the end of a year proportionate to the amount each woman saved. On average women received a 38% return on their investment.

Microfinance turned banking on its head showing how it was possible to reach (in large part) urban and peri-urban micro-entrepreneurs through institutions that started as NGOs and evolved into regulated financial institutions. Savings groups have in turned microfinance on its head by showing that for many (and certainly not all) a group of about 20 can save, provide loans to their members (because only need a loan at any one time) run themselves and self-replicate with no further staff presence (or at least very little).

We savings group practitioners believe that improved saving and lending services can be provided through these autonomous groups on reaching the at least 80% too poor and too rural to be reached by financial institutions. If these savings group principles are salted in enough villages we may wake up in a couple of decades to find that financial inclusion for the two billion or so who have been left out without institutional hoopla.

Savings groups are the simplest, least expensive and most robust approach to mass scale financial inclusion thus sidestepping many of the issues that Milford Bateman and many others (the source of the beginning of this thread).

Jeff

Jeffrey Ashe

jaashe@aol.com

-----Original Message-----
From: 'Meyer, Richard' meyer.19@osu.edu [MicrofinancePractice]
[MicrofinancePractice] <MicrofinancePractice@yahoogroups.com>
To: MicrofinancePractice <MicrofinancePractice@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thu, Jul 10, 2014 9:32 pm
Subject: RE: [MFP] Re: Fwd: FW: Unbanked News - South Africa

Hugh: do you have stats by country in Africa for number of groups, members, volume of savings, etc.? Any papers written about them? Dick

From: MicrofinancePractice@yahoogroups.com [mailto:MicrofinancePractice@yahoogroups.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2014 1:49 PM
To: MicrofinancePractice@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [MFP] Re: Fwd: FW: Unbanked News - South Africa

Self-promotion! Well, there's a thing. I mentioned SaveAct because it is the largest savings group activity in South Africa and is expanding very rapidly. I have very little involvement with them, but do believe that it's worth knowing about, even if it only makes poor people's live a bit more tolerable, while doing the reverse of what you deplore – creating indebtedness. I am sure that's not important in the face of the macro-tsunami you describe, but I find it worthwhile. Or do you think that 10 million people in Africa preferring to use savings groups to MFIs is a side-issue? At this time the scale is quite small in South Africa, but massive in other countries in the region - and everything starts with a small initiative.

Hugh

From: MicrofinancePractice@yahoogroups.com [mailto:MicrofinancePractice@yahoogroups.com]
Sent: 10 July 2014 11:15
To: MicrofinancePractice@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [MFP] Re: Fwd: FW: Unbanked News - South Africa

Hi Hugh, no, I had not heard of this initiative, but I'm not sure what point you are making (other than perhaps self-promotion) in bringing up one small initiative against a backdrop of massive microcredit sector failure in South Africa. I mean, South Africa's sophisticated first-world banks and their CEOs have been making huge profits from their engagement with microcredit. However, their profit-driven focus has mainly been upon serving poor black South African consumers to temporarily and unsustainably bump up their spending on needed consumer goods. But there was also a focus, even more unforgivably, on working with other 'perfect targets' like the financially illiterate miners in Rustenberg, who were a a result programmatically over-indebted over several years, which was a factor that contributed to their growing anger and resentment and ultimately strike action that ended with the 'Marikana Massacre' in 2012 when 34 miners were shot to death at close range by the South African police. Meanwhile, industrial and agricultural development is seriously faltering in South Africa on account of a desperate shortage of working and investment capital for long-term projects that will employ the poor in meaningful growth-oriented industrial and agricultural activities. So what one small initiative can do is surely not the issue when set against a background of such a disastrous misallocation of capital, wouldn't you agree?

Milford