Adolescent Savings for Transformation (S4T) Group in session

Youth savings groups (YSGs) can respond to their needs, promote entrepreneurship and workforce development skills that will help young people secure a prosperous future as they make their way into wage employment and entrepreneurship.

Children living in poverty face a tremendous number of challenges. In Ghana, 1 in 10 children live in extreme poverty and 1.2 million children live in households that are unable to provide adequate food due to insufficient income (UNICEF 2016). As a result, children may stop going to school so that they can work for a living. This consequently poses the risk of adolescent girls entering early marriages, or lacking literacy skills desperately needed to establish successful careers.

Sadly, these practices trap adolescent girls and their children into a possible lifetime of economic disadvantage. According to Ghana Demographic and Health Survey (2014), 41.6% or 4 in 10 women with no education were married before turning 18 as compared to 4.7 percent of women with secondary education.

Member of S4T Group paying her contribution

A Generation Seeking Hope

World Vision’s Savings for Transformation Groups model has been used as a starting point to reduce the exposure of children to all forms of violence and give them hope for the future. In Ghana, women beneficiaries gained economic empowerment through World Vision’s Cocoa Life Project. Thus, Savings Groups have become springboards for anti-child marriage and child labor awareness. Project facilitators used a focus group discussion approach to identify why girls stay out of school. To address the identified challenges including poverty, adolescent girls were grouped and trained in employable skills which will enable them to get jobs faster or get self-employed and save some money.

Ayishetu Mohammed, now 19 years old, has been a member of the "Onuado Savings Group" a mixed adult SG, pioneered by World Vision Ghana, for 2 years. She joined the group out of fear of dropping out of school like her other eight siblings due to poverty. When she failed her first basic school certificate examination, she was at risk of early marriage. Because of her savings, she was able to retake her basic school certificate examinations and is now confident of her future.

Ayishetu shares her story, "I aspire to be an example for young girls in similar conditions living in small communities and show that it's possible to succeed if you are determined, regardless of the cultural, religious and social limitations. My greatest achievement as a young girl has been not getting pregnant at a young age and gaining admission into senior secondary school to keep my dream on course of working in the military."

World Vision Ghana is implementing an adolescent/youth Savings Groups model to help many children like Ayishetu to secure their future.

Transforming Young Lives Through Savings Groups

As National Director for World Vision Ghana, I have witnessed how Savings Groups have empowered youth to respond to their needs, promote entrepreneurship and workforce development skills.

S4T Group members counting their money after a share-out

Savings Groups also provide opportunities for young people to learn about child protection and facilitate access to information and services, such as welfare, health, education in their communities and districts. Integrating child protection education with Savings Groups, microfinance and youth producer groups has helped ensure that no young beneficiary who enters the labor market is exploited along the value chain. “Child protection education helped me not to enter early marriage. I am now confident of my future,” said Ayishetu.

Savings Groups also help parents become economically independent to be able to provide for their children with a reduced risk of getting into sexual exploitation, child labor and forced/child marriage. Under the Cocoa Life project, World Vision Ghana established about 185 Savings groups across the 135 communities in groups of 25 with over 56% female membership with annual savings per group of US$ 2,003. With 4,802 members (2,698 women and 2,104 men) the groups had a combined capital of $11,218.86 for 2018.

Monitoring and evaluation reports by external evaluators have shown that additional livelihoods such as the introduction of savings for transformation groups (S4T) increased women’s income by well over a 100% and resulted in over 50% increase in girl child education, 50% reduction in teenage pregnancies, and 60% reduction in child labor.

As highlighted in the diagram below, SGs have indeed been a pillar upon which many child well-being outcomes have been achieved like health, nutrition, education et cetera.

Learn more about World Vision Ghana’s adolescents' programming on savings groups here, and follow us Twitter: @WorldVisionGH and @WorldVision.

Dicken Thunde is the National Director for World Vision Ghana with over 30 years cumulative experience having worked in various positions in WV Malawi, the Global Centre, East Africa Regional Office, World Vision Kenya and now National Director for World Vision Ghana since March 2017. Dickens is passionate about children and gets his motivation for his job when children experience release from abject poverty to pursue their dreams in life. As a child of a subsistence farmer who grew up in Malawi, he believes that transformation is possible for every child and adolescent given the right support mechanism.