During the last several decades microfinance institutions have been played an important role and positive way in providing financial services especially loan to millions of poor people in the world. However, the financial services have been limited access to the poor people living in the remote rural areas due to high cost of implementation with little profit. Another hand, those institutes have more considered in providing credit service to the medium and well-off livelihood in capital areas rather than providing the credit service to very poor people, so that the poor people in the remote rural areas have limitation access to credit service. According to the study shows that approximately 70% of population in Cambodia have not accessed to financial services from microfinance institutions as well as banks.
Because of no option, the villagers do saving through animal raising, buy jewelry or personal saving at home in order to serve for any urgent needs. However, these kinds of savings have not fully responded to their needs so they often borrowing money from the private money lenders with a high interest rate which made them difficulty to find money to pay back. In contrary, the establishing of saving groups at the village level have enable better advantages to all kind of people in the community, particularly the poorest, through mobilizing of local capital to help themselves using as financial services for improving their livelihood activities or other urgent needs in the community. It is necessary to have an appropriate methodology or mechanism to form the saving groups which applicable to the rural community contexts and can help the groups to be more sustainable.
This Saving for Change Manual for Field Facilitator’s Guide have been developed and reviewed as the 5th edition for Field Facilitators of Local NGOs or similar position to use as guidance for forming and support to the saving groups.
In order to use this manual effectively, it requires the users to have knowledge and understand as following
- Basic community facilitation skills (If the field staff do not have this basic skills, they would need support from other staff that have skills to build capacity and support for a cycle).
- Methodology in this manual focus on the strengthen of social capital which will contribute in building the communication and solidarity in the community, and also will contribute in positive changes in the community through improving individual as well as the whole society economy.
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