Journeys of Transformation

Congratulations to all our Scale X Design Accelerator teams on their inspiring pitches at last night’s Pitch Practice in Atlanta! And thanks to everyone who came out to Atlanta Tech Village to join us for our first-ever pitch event. We are thrilled to announce the 5 Scale X Design Challenge finalists who will compete in NYC on Thursday, January 26 at 7pm. Join us on Facebook Live next week!

CHAT!- Cambodia

Worldwide, young people are leaving their families and migrating to urban areas to seek work. While these workers are particularly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation, traditional NGO programs are ill-equipped to reach them. CHAT! harnesses the reality of young urban factory workers in Cambodia, integrating both entertainment and technology to provide cost-effective and high-impact heath education through a unique combination of hands-on training, relatable video dramas and mobile games.

Chomoka: Digitizing Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs)- Tanzania

For the 2 billion adults without a bank account, Chomoka aims to take traditional village Savings and loans groups and bring them into the digital age with a user-friendly mobile application that provides a pathway to formal financial services by documenting users’ credit histories while streamlining and simplifying the transactions of informal savings groups.

Journeys of Transformation- Rwanda

When women gain the means to contribute financially to their household, it can upset long-held power dynamics within the family, often leading to conflict and even violence. Journeys of Transformation is a training program that empowers couples to improve communication, positively transform the balance of power between husbands and wives, and reduce the incidents of intimate partner violence.

Krishi Utsho- Bangladesh

While small family farms and plots feed the majority of the world’s population, there are few businesses that cater to their needs and constraints. Krishi Utsho (KU) is a micro-franchise network of small kiosks that sell agriculture inputs, supplies and services to these farmers, particularly women, in rural Bangladesh.

Mobile Application to Secure Tenure (MAST)- Tanzania

For the millions of Tanzanians who don’t have documentation proving they own their land, MAST is a mobile application that shortens the time, reduces the cost and simplifies the process for individuals to claim their land rights.

The global humanitarian aid and development industry has a problem: innovation is everywhere, but examples of successfully scaled solutions are far less common. Even when we achieve impact at scale, the process can take decades. For example, it took 17 years for CARE’s Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLA) to go from idea to widespread impact, economically empowering millions. CARE’s Scale X Design (SXD) Accelerator was created to bridge that gap between innovation and impact. Two of the SXD teams’ innovations, Chomoka (Digital VSLA) and Journeys of Transformation, contain a VSLA component. Here is a story about VSLA at 25 that appeared in CARE’s latest edition of Impact Magazine.

CARE Village Savings & Loan Associations: A Transformative Innovation Then — and Now by Shawn Reeves

For 25 years, CARE Village Savings and Loan Associations have powered change through innovative economics. It all started with a few women, a lot of ingenuity and a lockbox in remote Niger. They engineered their own financial independence by saving pennies a week, then loaning one another money to start businesses such as making and selling peanut oil, doughnuts or home remedies. The interest they paid on their loans came back to them as profit. They had become their own bankers.

A quarter-century later, some 15,000 CARE savings groups operate in all reaches of Niger, their 500,000 members, mostly women, meeting regularly, depositing, saving, lending.

Some of that expansion happened strategically. Some of it happened organically, as people saw the success of CARE savings groups and wanted to share in that. The program may have started in Niger, but it didn’t end there. Further investment from CARE and word-of-mouth from passionate group members soon extended the concept to places like Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia.

Today, more than 200,000 CARE VSLAs operate in 26 African countries and in parts of Asia and Latin America, having engaged more than 5 million people. Enterprising members have found through those groups the financial freedom to improve life for their families, whether through better health and more nutritious food, expanded access to education or even savings-based safety nets that help families withstand and overcome disaster.

CARE now looks to the next frontier for its VSLA initiative, aiming in the next 25 years to help VSLA members more closely guard their assets — chiefly by linking them to formal banks, where their accounts are safe and accessible through smart phones and money-transferring apps. CARE already has begun linking VSLA groups to formal banks in places like Tanzania, Kenya, Ghana and Uganda. And by fall 2016, CARE had announced plans to link a half-million more people to banks by 2020.

But the benefits of formal banking don’t end with added security. Access to banks yields more sophisticated financial services that groups inevitably need as their resources, skills and confidence grow. It means larger loans, which groups demand as they mature. One report shows that linking members to banks can double both their savings and their profit.

As the next generation of VSLA members reaches for and seizes its own financial independence, some of them will still meet regularly under shade trees in Africa’s most distant villages. Others will convene in urban centers. They’ll adapt the model to ever-changing contexts. And they’ll continue to use the power of saving and lending to transform their lives and communities.

Category: Journeys of Transformation

Announcing the 5 Scale X Design NYC Challenge Finalists!

VSLA at 25