Exploring the Success of EFI’s Pro-Poor Package in Senegal and Uganda
Expanding Financial Inclusion in Africa (EFI) is a four-year project whose core goal is to ensure that vulnerable households experience greater financial inclusion to improve their resilience. To this end, EFI is forming savings groups using Catholic Relief Services’ Savings and Internal Lending Communities (SILC) and Private Service Provider (PSP) methodologies in Burkina Faso, Senegal, Uganda, and Zambia. The EFI project aims to create 19,200 new SILC groups with 502,320 members and has targeted its areas of operation using financial exclusion criteria; criteria which may well stand as a strong proxy for poverty. To try and bring in poorer households, EFI has made critical adjustments to the SILC methodology, known collectively as the "Pro-Poor Package" (PPP) and contrasted with "Normal" SILC programming. The PPP adjustments include, for example, training PSPs to identify and mobilize poor households, replacing a minimum savings with a target savings, removing fines for failure to save and reducing the pressure to take loans.
To develop EFI’s understanding of the differentiation on poverty outreach between Normal and Pro-Poor Package villages, the project has complemented the Progress out of Poverty Index (PPI) analysis with a community level ethnographic study. It aims to answer the following questions:
- To what extent are extremely poor households included in SILC membership?
- Has the inclusion of extremely poor households increased as SILC formation has progressed in the research sites?
- What elements of the Pro-Poor Package work to attract and retain the poor households in SILC programs?
