MicroSave: Project Completion Report

This review assesses the performance of MicroSave's third phase and the overall experience of MicroSave over its nine year history, identifying key achievements and lesson learned. MicroSave is a four-year project funded by Department for International Development (DFID), CGAP, the Austrian Development Agency and Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD). The review states that MicroSave has mostly achieved its objectives of strengthening the capacity of financial service providers to deliver market led financial solutions, increasing access by poor people to high quality financial services and informing and building the capacity of the financial sector to provide high quality financial services for poor people. MicroSave has accumulated considerable achievements and faced many challenges. MicroSave's experiences highlight the importance of:

• Wider financial sector development agenda that includes moving from organizations to systems;
• Good market understanding for effective intervention;
• Building scope for pilot initiatives and flexibility into intervention design;
• Strategy for Interventions to achieve wider systemic change;
• Agencies as catalysts to facilitate market system change, without participating in markets directly;
• Rigorous, transparent approach to sustainability;
• Time, good people and multifaceted interventions for market development.