by Robert Gonza, Quality Assurance Officer (HOPE Rwanda)
When I started working with HOPE Rwanda, I didn’t know if I believed in savings groups.
My job in quality assurance includes interacting with our field partner staff, training them about quality assurance processes like reporting documents, attending monthly mentoring meetings, and visiting and encouraging saving groups. I enjoyed my job and my team, but I was not always very sure how savings groups were transforming people’s lives.
Almost anyone you ask at HOPE Rwanda will be quick to share the statistics of how the saving groups are transforming lives—how many families we serve, how much they’ve saved, the number of cows, goats, and pigs they’ve purchased with their savings. Three years later, I now myself could share all these things. And I thought that the numbers were the most important things about these savings groups.
But I was wrong. They are about way more than just the savings, the number of loans, or those who attended the meeting—or pigs or cows. Continue Reading…
![Before Eveness Mulungu joined the Walusungu (“mercy”) savings group through our church partner in Malawi, she faced days where she and her family ate animal feed because they couldn’t afford human food. But that changed when she joined the savings group. Eveness used her first group loan of about $1.70 (U.S.) to start a business selling doughnuts and beans.
“By the end of my first cycle I made $140 (U.S.),” Eveness shared. “My life is no longer the same now; [I] was regarded as no one in the community. ... This was the first time in my life that I ever touched and owned big money like this!”
Pictured: Eveness, with her husband in front of their piggery—a third successful business that she operates.](https://blog.hopeinternational.org/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed/img/placeholder.png)