POWER Africa aimed to increase the financial inclusion of 480,000 poor, food insecure individuals and their households in rural and peri-urban areas in Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia and Côte d’Ivoire. Now complete, POWER Africa surpassed its targets, reaching over 750,000 households.

The project used CARE’s Village Savings and Loan Association (VSLA) methodology and a complex suite of layered trainings geared toward entrepreneurship and business management. The project worked with local organizations and government to form, train, and link VSLA groups to financial service providers, mobile network operators and markets.

Data collection, monitoring, and learning has been a major focus. POWER Africa has yielded significant learning across a wide variety of topics that enabled CARE to better design and target programming to reach youth, food insecure, and women headed households across multiple contexts.

This event will share findings from POWER Africa’s learning agenda, specifically:

• Youth livelihoods, focusing on adolescent girls in Burundi
• Designing gender equality considerations into financial inclusion programming
• Resiliency learning in Ethiopia and Burundi
• Processes and impacts of linking VSLA groups to formal financial service providers and mobile network operators

The session will be geared towards practitioners, FSPs, donors and supporting organizations.