DEPTH OF POVERTY OUTREACH (two-pager)

This summary covers the main results of a report that drew from more than 25,000 PPI interviews, exploring poverty outreach in Burkina Faso, Senegal, Uganda, and Zambia. The report addressed the following questions:

• What is the mean poverty level of SILC group members, relative to their communities, at the start of the program?
• What are the effects of the PPS delivery model variants in terms of poverty outreach?

EFI was a 4-year project whose core goal was to ensure that vulnerable households experienced greater financial inclusion to improve their resilience. To this end, EFI formed savings groups using CRS' Savings and Internal Lending Communities (SILC) and Private Service Provider (PSP) methodologies in Burkina Faso, Senegal, Uganda, and Zambia. The EFI project aimed to create 19,200 new SILC groups with 502,320 members and had targeted its areas of operation using financial exclusion criteria; criteria which may well stand as a strong proxy for poverty. To try to bring in poorer households, EFI made critical adjustments to the SILC methodology, known collectively as the "Pro-Poor Package" (PPP) and contrasted with "Normal" SILC programming. The PPP adjustments included, for example, training PSPs to identify and mobilize poor households, replacing a minimum savings with a "target" savings, removing fines for failure to save and reducing the pressure to take loans.

Other research reports related to this project are available here.