Photo Credit: Peter Caton/CARE 2017

How about we went into a project saying, “women are powerful, let’s treat them that way?” If we wish to impact lives beyond the life of one project, and beyond a narrow range of outcomes, we have to think bigger than a log frame. We must think about how women can build tools and networks that let them transform their own lives.

That’s where Savings Groups come in. Savings Groups are exceptionally powerful since they are one of the few tools in international development programming that both focus primarily on women and treat them as economic actors. In CARE’s programming, 81% of Savings Groups members are women. Since 1991, women around the world have used these savings to expand their skills, build social networks, and establish businesses, with remarkable results.

You can tell we’re fans. At CARE, we think that Savings Groups make a huge difference, and not just with money. If you’re looking for evidence, it’s pretty easy to prove that women in Savings Groups have more money. But what about other issues? Are Savings Groups really giving women a platform to change the rest of their lives?

With funding and collaboration from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, CARE set out to answer two key questions:

1. How can we effectively ensure that Savings Groups are delivering outcomes for Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE)?
2. Who is best placed to scale the kind of savings groups that the poorest women and girls can use to achieve maximum impact?

We drew from an extensive literature review, in-depth case studies of 12 cases in East Africa, and Key Informant Interviews and Round Table Discussions with women’s rights groups, the private sector, and governments to answer these questions.

What did we find?

• Women indeed empower themselves and their members through Savings Groups. There is strong evidence that women can develop skills and confidence as part of SGs, where they pool savings and risk, build additional life skills, and access markets more effectively. There is also moderate evidence of results where women are able to work together to achieve their personal and social goals or encourage a dialogue about their role in making decisions in the household.
• Influencing structures for gender equality requires work. There is less evidence of women in Savings Groups affecting structural change - especially around building critical consciousness of gender issues and enhancing group solidarity to change the legal environment or social norms.
• Not all Savings Groups are equal. The research highlighted that Savings Groups exist in a fragmented landscape, where most actors are operating in silos, and at a relatively small scale. There are few standards applied to Savings Groups at a large scale and across actors, especially as it relates to WEE outcomes. Some ways of structuring and supporting groups are more likely to prioritize WEE in addition to savings.

Who is best placed to scale Savings Groups to deliver WEE outcomes?

• Start with the public sector. Some governments are already investing in Savings Groups at scale as part of their social protection strategies. In a few cases, governments are going beyond the financial component, layering in life skills and/or health training. However, governments have yet to master the layering of services that would deliver more holistic empowerment outcomes. There is ample space for advocacy to help governments commit to and implement other services coupled with financial inclusion.
• Work with women’s rights organizations and the private sector to expand services. The private sector and women’s rights organizations have skills to help layer components around access to markets and critical consciousness of gender, respectively. However, those groups struggle to find resources and incentives to create Savings Groups at a large scale themselves.
• Provide convening space and technical support. INGOs have a role to play in convening, advocacy, and extending technical assistance to governments. Governments have demonstrated that they are willing to partner with other actors to achieve these goals.

So, what do we do next?

This research highlights that successfully creating WECs on a national scale will require collaboration between a variety of different actors, forging partnerships not seen before. Here’s a few key recommendations:

• Invest in governments as the most promising path to scale. To varying degrees, governments in East Africa have displayed an appetite for scaling gender-transformative Savings Groups. There is an opportunity to provide technical support and connections to partners who can reinforce gender equality and market access outcomes.
• Improve work on gender equality: A critical gap in current work is that few projects are currently focusing on understanding and overcoming gender inequality, especially those run by governments. We must expand their impact by directly understanding and incorporating gender equality goals.
• Fill in research gaps. This effort focused on East Africa. Researchers should look for evidence from other regions, especially in West Africa where SGs have focused more on women’s empowerment goals, in the areas of gender consciousness and group solidarity to find impact evidence and best practice examples. Share examples of projects where women use SGs to empower themselves or contribute data where you have collected information on empowerment and gender equality
• Consider the lifecycle of groups: This research showed glimmers of evidence that groups get stronger, more active, and more focused on gender equality over time. We should search for evidence to confirm or invalidate that idea.

This blog shares key insights from CARE’s recent publication, Assessing the Viability of Savings Groups as a Vehicle for Women’s Economic Empowerment in Africa with findings from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Ethiopia. If you’re interested in how Savings Groups and their members are responding to COVID-19 and building back better, please check out the learning agenda at the 2020 SEEP Annual Conference.

Emily Janoch is the Director for Knowledge Management and Learning at CARE, focusing on ways to better learn from, share, and use implementation experiences on eradicating poverty through empowering women and girls in order to improve impact. With 15 years of experience, she is an expert in designing systems to capture and share information across many sources, and facilitating conversations with practitioners and decision-makers. She has a BA in International Studies from the University of Chicago, and a Masters in Public Policy in International and Global Affairs from the Harvard Kennedy School.