In 1946 or thereabouts my father took me to the local bank and helped me to open an account. He made something of a small ceremony of it, and he added ten shillings (around two U.S. dollars in those days) to my ten shillings of savings to make it up to one pound. I do [...]

The importance and role of savings with respect to the economic and social development of developing countries and of African countries in particular have long been recognized.  Savings are quite often the primary source of financing for small individual projects. They are also the main source of funding used to meet daily needs such as [...]

“Although [microfinance] has promise on a small scale, history suggests that when scaled up, and especially when used as an instrument of government policy, it will likely create significant problems…” So wrote distinguished economist Raguram Rajan in Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy –perhaps influenced most by his familiarity with Indian [...]

When Women’s World Banking (WWB) started our savings and financial education program for girls in 2008, we were excited about the potential to provide a sustainable, scalable way to encourage girls to build assets and become better money managers. However, in our research on how to encourage youth to save we have come across findings [...]

Over the past ten years, there has been a greater focus on developing savings products that meet the needs of the poor. More and more people understand that even the poorest save.  But, reaching the poor and very poor does not happen automatically. Providers who seek to reach people at the very bottom of the [...]

Toward the end of the 19th century, postal services began to contribute to the development of a savings culture in many of today’s industrialized countries. And they are playing a similar role in developing and emerging countries at the dawn of the 21st century. A number of postal banks meet several of the key elements [...]

I’d like to share an excerpt from my book, More Than Good Intentions, co-authored with Jacob Appel. We did not set out to write a technical expose on quantitative analysis and randomized trials–quite the opposite. As I hope the excerpt demonstrates, Jacob and I weave qualitative human interest stories together with results from, yes, randomized [...]

‘Saving’ is both a noun and a verb. If you want savings (the noun) you first have to make them (the verb). If you’re rich it’s not hard to make savings, because you have many tools for the job, such as automated deductions from salaries. So the rich focus on the noun – making sure [...]

When I traveled to Haiti to study savings in 2008, I found very little savings. Poor people saved in modest amounts. Some were depositing in clubs called mutuelles de solidarité or in local rotating savings and credit associations (or ROSCAs). But after asking around bit, I found that there was significant money in borlettes.

My colleague and I were once asked at a conference, “So, how exactly does a bank account reduce poverty?” Great question. If you are a low-income household, among the myriad range of challenges competing for your time and attention; there are two that very likely claim the lion’s share: the everyday problem of managing income-consumption [...]

People’s savings goals generally relate to future payments they would like to make: for school fees, housing, weddings, working capital for trading activities or health emergencies. By planning payments, households can seek to stabilize their daily circumstances, develop opportunities to improve their condition in the future, and mitigate shocks that can set their families back. [...]

Successful savings products can transform financial institutions, leading to explosive growth in numbers of clients, funds for on-lending and income. Grameen Bank’s under-recognised transformation to Grameen II in 2002 saw a massive increase in clients – including many who repaid loans that were long overdue in order to gain access to the new range of [...]