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Code: SAV-ENG-0003 Authors: Leonard Mutesasira, Henry Sampangi, Harry Mugwanga, John Kashangaki, Florence Maximambali, Christopher Lwoga, David Hulme, Graham Wright and Stuart Rutherford. Date: May 1999 Quantity: 1 Type: copyMicroSave – Africa
“Promoting secure, high quality savings services for poor people”
Savings and the Poor
the methods, use and impact of savings by poor of the East Africa
MicroSave-Africa is a newcomer to the fast-growing microfinance scene in Africa. It set uo shop in Kampala in the latter part of 1998 under the banner “promoting secure, high-quality savings services for poor people”. Sensibly, one of its first acts was to commission research into ‘microsavings’ – savings made in relatively small amounts by poor people in the continent. This report begins to answer a series of questions related to microsavings by describing what 9 researchers observed during a few short weeks in the field in the 3 countries – the East African trio of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania – in early 1999.
The report is organized as follows. After the Executive Summary comes a section called ‘Preliminaries’, which summarizes the objectives and the execution of the study. Next comes ‘Managing Money’, which offers a conceptual framework for understanding the role that savings play in the lives of the poor. This is followed by a short section on ‘Defining the Poor’. The framework is then used to analyze the material presented in the next section called ‘How the Poor Save’, in which the services and devices used by poor savers are described, and their merits discussed. Finally, a section called ‘Opportunities’ discusses the paths that appear to be open to East African microfinance institutions that wish to improve their savings products.
