This May, our intern Christine Stenton worked with local Ugandan partner Needy Support Centre to provide training and start-up funds in order to facilitate the restructuring of the Needy Support Center’s group savings and loans scheme to make it more accessible, transparent and accountable to its members.

The two-day training was intended to help reduce the economic vulnerability of NSC’s members by encouraging individuals to save, facilitate access to small loans at an affordable interest rate. This will enable NSC members  to invest in improving their income generating activities and sustainably build the organization’s capacity by contributing to its operational costs and group activities. A total of 21 members of NSC completed the training facilitated by CAPAIDS-Uganda program lead Lawrence Gege.

All members have received passbooks in order to track their personal savings and loans records and ensure transparency among group members. They have now, as of May 17th, received seed money to support them in building the fund. Impact of this project is being measured through Knowledge, Attitudes and Practice (KAP) surveys and through follow-up interviews with loan recipients to track the difference access to capital will have on their household livelihoods.

Immediately post-training participants had already demonstrated a 5% increase in LAP scores related to propensity to save and even grater improvement sin knowledge of best practices for managing savings and loans.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA