In Their Own Hands by Jeffrey Ashe

Author:Jeffrey Ashe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2014-12-07T16:00:00+00:00

Voluntary Replication

The technical unit and partner NGOs engaged in their own backward dance, gradually expanding the role of the animator from “trainer of groups” to “trainer of trainers.” In our vision, volunteer replicating agents would take on the bulk of the work of organizing new groups. At first, we imagined a spontaneous process of inspired group members bringing the savings group idea to their families and friends, or neighbors who witnessed a group’s success approaching existing groups and copying their methods, as I had seen in Nepal and India. Reports of unprompted, unlinked new groups were gratifying and exciting. I anticipated that this process of spontaneous replication would cause Saving for Change to spread virally across Mali, without need for our support.

Unfortunately, spontaneous replication, though important, proved both insufficient and inefficient. Groups would often form, but they would be poorly organized, missing key elements of the structure that had been so carefully designed to ensure transparency, participation, and ownership by all members. We felt too that the rate of replication was low compared with what we had hoped for and what we would need to reach our desired scale. Animators, we learned, sometimes stopped volunteers from forming new groups because they were not sure whether they should be encouraging replication. The animators who did encourage volunteers to train new groups did so on an ad hoc basis, but their roles were confused—who did what? Should volunteers just teach from memory based on how their own groups work, could they perhaps shadow an animator while she trains and copy her process, or were they supposed to receive specific guidance?

We were encountering the tension between maintaining a high-quality program with clear structures in place to ensure effectiveness, accountability, and transparency and our desire to leave it all in the hands of the group members. The key to resolving this tension came in the form of an interactive training process that empowered participants to feel ownership over their knowledge. A later study would prove that formal training for replicating agents resulted in greater participation in Saving for Change, and better socioeconomic outcomes such as increased livestock ownership and food security.39

By closely observing the group replication activity already underway, we designed a system to move from laissez-faire, spontaneous replication to the “replicating agent model,” discovering that we could vastly increase the number of groups trained in the process. Working closely with Freedom from Hunger, we simplified the Saving for Change manual even further, cutting text until it was almost entirely a set of simple pictures that illustrated each step in training a group. Our intent was that someone with low or no literacy skills, once trained on this manual, would have the tools to facilitate the participatory, discussion-based training sessions we felt were essential to creating member-managed savings groups.

Next, we adjusted the animator’s role in introducing Saving for Change to a village. Animators would train the first group and then move on after identifying one or two smart, energetic women who wanted to take on the replicating agent (RA) role in their village.

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