Savings: An Essential Service for the Poor

This booklet highlights opportunities, needs, issues and challenges facing those who would provide appropriate, market-led savings services for the poor.

Poor people use ingenious methods to save, most of which are informal. These informal mechanisms rarely meet the needs of the poor in a convenient, cost-effective and secure manner. Providing poor households with safe, easily accessible opportunities to save increases their commitment to saving and the amounts they manage to save. MFIs are increasingly recognizing the need to provide savings services not only as a much-valued service to their clients, but also as a long-term source of capital.

MicroSave has worked with several organizations across Asia and Africa to deliver market-led and efficient savings services to low-income clients. This booklet brings together a set of publications which examine MicroSave’s sectoral expertise and experience, and combines it with the views and opinions of leading practitioners so as to:

• Stress on need for savings services among underprivileged clients;
• Highlight opportunities for delivery of such services;
• Examine challenges encountered in provision of savings services to the poor.