On the Ground: VSLA Group Profile

Members of Oberabic’s VSLA group wait for their weekly meeting to start

The village, Oberabic, meaning Five Mosquitos in Luo, is not unlike the hundreds of other small villages carpeting the countryside of northern Ugandan.  Subsistence farmers separated from one another by vast swaths of farmland are its residents.  Its roads are mottled paths tunneled by head high grasses.  Its nights—electricity and light bulb-free—are cloaked in deep, penetrating shadows when clouds float thick.  There’s no bustling town center.  No large restaurants or modern internet cafes.  Because they pull their livelihoods from the earth beneath their feet, season by season, many people in Oberabic exist on the fringes of a money-based economy, relying on bartering and infrequent money-based purchases to survive.  Which is why, on this day, the meeting taking place is more remarkable:  farmers who have never done so before are pooling their cash, balancing financial ledgers, and taking loans.

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Scrubby trees tattooed paisley, shifting shadows on the ground around us.  Women, barefoot and covered in ankle-length faded floral skirts, sat in two different clusters:  mothers with infants to the left, others to the right.  The few men in attendance sat in chairs off to the right of the women, forming a human wall that separated the group from the hut-dotted clearing behind us.  Chickens cut like slow-moving arrows through the scene, ignoring  feet, mats, and skirts as they walked; mechanically, they pecked at everything in their paths, as if they’d been wound up beforehand and were now clicking sporadically toward their energetic expiration.

The twenty villagers before us were gathered for their weekly savings group meeting.  As some of the 400 members of IC’s Village Savings and Loans Association (VSLA), they had grown accustomed to the routine—the setting aside of money each week, the midday walk to their meeting point, the contributing of money to the group savings fund, and, the best part:  the borrowing of money from that fund in the form of small, interest-generating loans.  With almost five months of savings experience under their belts, group members had become set in their ways.  Eric and I were there to see if those ways were the same ones IC staff taught the group at its inception.

Every VSLA group has a lock box, center.  The box holds the group’s records and is secured by three locks (meaning three key holders must be present to open it).

Like a teacher hunting for test mistakes, Eric scanned the group’s record books.   He pointed out things that the group had documented well, and critiqued the things they had not.  He got feedback from the group’s leader about progress the group had been making, about weekly savings averages.  Then, smiling, he explained to the group that they would be eligible to win 250,000 shillings [$125 US] in a contest that IC is sponsoring.

All 20 VSLA groups, Eric said, would compete against one another in areas of record keeping and attendance to win a hefty cash prize.  The prize, once obtained, would be put toward an income generating activity (IGA) of the group’s choosing.  Potential group IGA’s  include:  running a local kiosk that supplies villagers with hard-to-obtain goods, farming a group member’s land, and purchasing and renting out oxen or cattle.

With a combination of good internal organization and leadership, as well as support along the way from IC staff, Oberabic’s first VSLA group is seeding an invaluable culture of saving in its community.