Mozambican Women find resources where there were none!

Savings groups are an incredibly powerful and dynamic way of building people’s confidence in themselves and opening up resources they did not consider possible. Story after story keeps coming in of how people are empowered, and of how a culture of truth-telling, openness, transparency, accountability and responsibility is being created.

In Mozambique it started with an MCC worker getting together with some women partners to talk about the idea of savings groups. In a ‘savings group’ members of a community gather together on a regular basis to contribute to their own savings to a common fund. After accumulating a certain amount, they begin giving out loans to members to be repaid with interest.

Some of them, by pooling small amounts of money together, are able to gather astonishing amounts of cash in rural areas where everyone thought they were poor. When they divide up the funds at the end of a cycle, members have accumulated money to make larger purchases they usually could not afford.

This is important because many areas of Mozambique have no banks of any kind and because cultural values of "sharing" make accumulating money difficult. When the main economic challenge is surviving periods of hunger, mutual sharing helps keep people from dying. However, these values also impede individuals’ abilities to save for things that help improve their lives: school supplies or tuition, a tin roof, a bicycle, better tools for farming or medicine for their children.

In one church where members seldom had even half a metical (2 cents) to put in the offering, the 12 savings group members each contributed 50 meticals ($2) to buy church benches instead of sitting in the dust. “We promise you,” group members told Cristina Semente, coordinator of the work with savings groups, “you are going to see great changes here!”

Semente, said when people have money, they start looking around and seeing the needs among them. They believe they have the power to do something rather than feeling poor. These groups, she said, motivate people to get moving. People know they have a savings meetings coming up and that they need to have something to contribute. She said that instead of thinking they are poor or that they don’t have a job and can’t do anything, they get busy selling or making something or doing some other, temporary work.

A group near Beira did its second distribution earlier this year. Some 41,700 meticals (approx $1,400) was collected. In the first cycle members collected some 4,000 meticals. People start out with a suspicion that the organizers will walk off with their money. When they discover that it really is their money, for them to use, they get motivated. In this case, they increased their savings by 1,000 percent from one cycle to the next.

Women are leading all of these efforts. MCC had suggested to the Women's Society that if the society helped to organize savings groups of both women and men, not all group officers should be men. The Women’s Society decided that since men tend to dominate women if they are in positions of leadership, the society would let only women be group officers in the groups it helps organize.  [from an MCC news release]