Jeffrey Ashe

Growing up in San Diego and steeped in the power of grassroots activism during the Berkley Free Speech in the 60s I led a group Peace Corps Volunteers and local leaders who brought land and justice to Ecuador’s peasant farmers. Leaving Peace Corps, I spent the next twenty years designing, evaluating and managing microfinance programs in more than thirty countries, but I was becoming disillusioned – savings not credit was what was most needed and the poorest were not being reached, at least not in numbers that would make much of a difference. I sought new answers in Nepal, India and Zimbabwe where I observed small groups saving what they could and lending to each other as they needed and dividing the profits among themselves. Financial inclusion was being achieved without the complex and costly financial institutions I had been promoting for so long. Taking what I learned I launched Saving for Change through Oxfam America and Freedom from Hunger where smart villagers created their own mini financial institutions similar to what I had seen in Nepal. Savings groups, as we came to call them, are a robust, simple, game-changing innovation that once launched spread virally from village to village. The outcome: a village wide decrease in chronic hunger, growing assets – more goats to sell in a pinch - and empowered women. I had returned to what I learned in Berkeley and Ecuador decades earlier, success is the responsibility of those who will directly benefit.

In Their Own Hands: How Savings Groups are Revolutionizing Development is an account of how Saving for Change was implemented in 8,000 villages across five countries as we served a catalyst for smart villagers come up with their own solutions. These same lessons can be applied across the development spectrum. Two and a half billion people need better financial services – we can’t do it for them. There are savings groups with ten million members now promoted by many institutions. This number could increase tenfold in a decade with modest outside support.