|
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.
This Focus Note summarizes the findings from Country-Level Savings Assessments in Benin, Bosnia, Mexico, the Philippines, and Uganda, which suggest five strategies for improving poor people's access to savings services.
Savings and credit cooperatives provide financial services to millions,
including poor and low-income people in many countries. Thus, donors who want
to increase access to financial services, especially savings, often support savings
and credit cooperatives. Working with these cooperatives offers many advantages,
but, to be effective, donors must learn how to overcome several unique challenges.The
latest Donor Brief Working with Savings & Credit Cooperatives provides guidance
on how to address these challenges.
These guidelines embody the working consensus of CGAP donor members on how donors can support deposit services in microfinance. The paper examines what the poor seek from savings and other deposit services, and analyzes the potential of different financial institutions to offer these services. It reviews the financial and institutional capacity requirements needed, such as operating environments, costs and pricing, market orientation, and the depth of outreach of a deposit services provider are examined.
Here are the results of CGAP's survey of the global outreach of a broad set of institutions that extend financial services downward---institutions with a "double bottom line" of financial and social/development objectives. The survey found that over 750 million acccounts exist below the traditional level of commercial banks, and that a substantial fraction of these predominantly savings accounts probably belong to the poor or near poor--and represent an important opportunity for outreach.
Four deposit-taking MFIs-the Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives in Thailand, Banca Caja Social in Colombia, Bank Rayat Indonesia, and the Rural Bank of Panabo in the Philippines-were studied by the CGAP Working Group on Savings. GTZ (Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit, Society for Technical Cooperation) of Germany conducted the original research on which the note is based.
This synopsis of a paper by Marguerite S. Robinson looks at the ways microcredit institutions can mobilize voluntary savings from the public, potentially the largest and the most immediately available source of finance for some MFIs.
| 
