Community Savings Circles and Remittances: Building on the Trillion Dollar Informal Economic System
Jeffrey Ashe, Director of Grassroots Finance Action who teaches a course on financial inclusion at SIPA, will explore how practitioners can catalyze the skills of savings group leaders to lead the "financial inclusion" of the two billion people who do not save at all. From institutional solutions to bottom-up wisdom.
About the speaker:
As Oxfam America’s Director of Community Finance, Jeff Ashe led the Saving for Change Initiative. Saving Change grew to 703,000 village women organized into savings groups in Mali, Senegal, Cambodia, El Salvador and Guatemala. Prior to his work at Oxfam, he founded and led Working Capital, a micro lending initiative that operated in six states for which he was honored by President Clinton at the White House. While serving as Acción International’s Senior Associate Director, he directed the first worldwide study of microfinance, introduced group lending to Acción and helped spread this model worldwide. He has consulted to microfinance projects in more than 35 countries.
Jeff is Director of Grassroots Finance Action (https://www.grassrootsfinanceaction.org) that researches and tests innovative approaches for ending extreme poverty. He and his graduate students from Columbia and Brandeis Universities recently completed a study on group saving in immigrant communities. (https://mangotree.org/Resource/How-to-Achieve-the-American-Dream-on-an-Immigrants-Income). Currently, he is exploring how the strongest organizers of informal savings circles in poor countries can be encouraged to train better groups, and how remittances can be better channeled to promote local development. Projects testing these concepts are underway in Guatemala, Lynn and New Bedford in Massachusetts and soon in El Salvador.
