Savings Initiative: from Learning to Sharing
CGAP launched the Savings Initiative in December 2004 to learn about how to lower the barriers that keep many poor savers outside the formal financial system. Today, these efforts have borne fruit and CGAP is increasingly focusing on sharing the lessons learned with the widest possible array of stakeholders.
- Who are the Clients of Savings Banks? A poverty assessment of the clients reached by savings banks in India, Mexico, Tanzania and Thailand. This WSBI study commissioned by CGAP explores how well savings banks reach clients at different poverty levels and how different clients use financial products. Read the Executive Summary and the Full Study.
- CGAP's Newsletter PORTFOLIO focuses on savings. The articles include: Savings for Poor People: Good for clients, good for business?; Behind the Headlines: Savings and Asset Building for the Poor: An interview with CGAP microfinance experts Kate McKee and Evelyn Stark; Innovative Marketing in Peru: Helping poor people save?; Data Download: Everything you ever wanted to know about savings.
- The Microfinance Gateway features three savings highlights. Hatton Bank's innovative large-scale savings program; the massive marketing effort to increase savings in Uganda; and the business case for offering savings to poor people.
- The True Cost of Deposit Mobilization. This draft report presents findings from an activity-based cost study of deposit services in five financial institutions. The study reveals that a total deposit cost varies dramatically among the institutions and that the cost of deposits alone does not determine their attractiveness to institutions. For all five institutions, the contribution of deposit services to their social mission makes up for their impact on overall profitability.
- New CGAP Study on Self-Help Groups in India. In a country where 50 million households live in poverty with limited access to financial services, self help groups (SHGs) are servicing over 33 million members and have become the dominant model of microfinance. CGAP's new two-part study examines the financial viability of SHGs in India and proposes a methodology for designing SHG programs to ensure their sustainability. Nine strong SHG programs demonstrate the potential of the model when it is well executed.
- Community finance models interviews. Building on the issues raised in the SHG paper, CGAP is organizing a series of interviews with leading practitioners that compare the SHG model with other community finance models.
- Microfinance institutions overwhelmingly want to mobilize deposits. Recent CGAP and Grameen Foundation research on MFI decision-making regarding capital structure indicates that MFIs consider deposits to be more attractive than either debt or equity. However, MFI cost calculations are often incomplete or inaccurate for all three types of funding. An upcoming brief will explore the complex decisions and choices.
- Country-Level Savings Assessment Tool (Draft) CGAP produced this Draft Country-Level Savings Assessment (CLSA) Tool to help guide analysts and researchers who wish to undertake CLSAs and to guide governments and donors who wish to commission CLSAs. The tool provides a systematic methodology for analyzing opportunities and constraints to savings mobilization at the country level.