Scale2Save Campaign
Micro savings, maximum impact.
On the occasion of World Savings Day 2021, Tanzania Commercial Bank Plc (TCB), a WSBI member and learning partner of its programme for financial inclusion, Scale2Save, shared the experience of working with savings groups in rural areas. TCB developed the digital product M-KOBA to address five main challenges savings groups face. Now, TCB is taking M-KOBA further by targeting Village Savings and Loans Associations.
Further insights on Scale2Save youth research in Africa
>> Read: Full story at News & Views magazine (page 46)
>> See: Scale2Save youth research | Young people in Africa savings patterns
BRUSSELS, 29 July 2020
The following piece by Guy Stuart, Executive Director, Microfinance Opportunities, is scheduled to appear in the NextBillion blogsite. Based at the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan, NextBillion is an open forum for the development through enterprise sector.
Last year I was part of a team that conducted a Financial Diaries study of young people in Morocco, Nigeria, and Senegal as part of a comprehensive research on ‘Young People in Africa’ that was conducted on behalf of the Scale2Save Programme — a partnership initiative between the World Savings and Retail Banking Institute (WSBI) and the Mastercard Foundation. The team has produced a comprehensive report on our findings, but we also wanted to share some of what we learned in more accessible blogs and draw out the implications for the time of Covid-19. This is the first of three blogs coming out of that study.
Young people in Morocco, Nigeria, and Senegal tend to live in their parents’ home until around 25 years of age. Young people maintain a strong connection to their parents when still living at home, and that bond doesn’t go away when living away from home. In this context, parents often provide financial and other support to their children. But is this always the case? What can financial service providers and financial inclusion promoters learn from the Scale2Save-commissioned diaries studies conducted in Morocco, Nigeria, and Senegal?
In this study we asked participants to tell us about any support they had given or received from various members of their family, as well as friends and neighbours. The answers suggest a complex, dynamic interplay between parents and their children that extend beyond a one-way dependency of young people on their parents, especially among the Morocco sample of young people.
In the face of the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns it entails, opportunities for young people to earn money have been hit hard. At the same time their parents are facing similar challenges. We do not know the ultimate impact of the pandemic on families, but the diaries data suggest that it will play out not only through the effect of the pandemic on the economic activities of individual family members but also through its effect on the economic relationships among family members.
