Skip main navigation

New offer! Get 30% off your first 2 months of Unlimited Monthly. Start your subscription for just £35.99 £24.99. New subscribers only T&Cs apply

Find out more

Participatory planning: women’s saving group

Watch video Margaret bayoh fedurp savings group dwarzack informal settlement self-organising participatory finance banking
10.7
My name is Margaret Bayoh from Dwarzack Community, I’m a federation member. My savings group is Agape Savings Group. All the staff here do save. And I’m the collector for my group, Agape Savings Group. We save according to our earning. We save as much as we can. We don’t have fixed amount. Someone pays 1500, we started with 50 Leones, 100 Leones, 500 Leones, 1,000 Leones. We save as much as we can. The impact is too much. The savings help us to pay our children’s school fee. It also helps us to pay our rents. It helps us in solving the medical bills. Even family problems, through the savings.
61.7
When you have $500,000, you don’t have to go to any other person to loan money. So if you have $500,000, for example, [and] you have a $200,000 problem, you don’t allow anybody to know your secrets, because we save to make our secret be secret. Because when you go to someone to borrow money, you can’t just go and say, Mr. Ali, give me $200,000. Mr. Ali will say, come Margaret, why do you want this $200,000? I must explain because I want the money. So because of these savings, I don’t have to explain my secrets to anyone. Just the chairperson collector says, right, Ms. Mami Aseta I want $200,000 for my savings. So my problem was solved.
103.8
And a lot of us have benefitted through that. Here, we loan among ourselves. This money, that we are collecting we save, after some amount, we have another – a huge amount, like $2 million [Leones]. We decided to loan among ourselves, so that our savings will grow. Whilst we are paying the loan, we also save. And this will help us to attend send some of our social problems in our community.

You will now meet Ms Margaret Bayoh, a resident of Dwarzack and member of the Federation of the Urban and Rural Poor and the Agape savings group.

She will tell you how the group has improved her and the other savers’ lives, in part due to the things they have been able to use their savings towards, such as school and hospital fees. As previously discussed, savings groups are used as a key tool in the participatory planning approach promoted by Slum Dwellers International through the Federations of the Urban and Rural Poor. Savings groups contribute in very material ways, building the community’s resources to invest in housing and community infrastructure, but they also help to develop relationships of trust amongst residents, strengthening communities.

This article is from the free online

Development and Planning in African Cities: Exploring theories, policies and practices from Sierra Leone

Created by
FutureLearn - Learning For Life

Reach your personal and professional goals

Unlock access to hundreds of expert online courses and degrees from top universities and educators to gain accredited qualifications and professional CV-building certificates.

Join over 18 million learners to launch, switch or build upon your career, all at your own pace, across a wide range of topic areas.

Start Learning now