Motivation
Savings groups play a central role in expanding financial access across Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly for women, but many remain constrained by limited capital and time-intensive, paper-based operations. Group-based loans have the potential to relax capital constraints, while digital ledgers may improve efficiency, accuracy, and links to formal finance. Because women make up most savings group members, these innovations may also reshape women’s economic empowerment (WEE). Yet existing evidence offers limited causal insight into how group loans and digitized recordkeeping affect women’s agency, financial autonomy, and intra-group dynamics. This study addresses that gap by examining whether and through which channels these financial and digital innovations translate into meaningful gains in women’s empowerment.
Objective
This study builds on a randomized controlled trial in Uganda and Malawi that evaluates two interventions: (1) FAST group loans, offered by VisionFund and disbursed via mobile money, and (2) DreamSave digital ledgers, a smartphone application that digitizes group recordkeeping. Savings groups are cross-randomized into four arms—FAST only, DreamSave only, both interventions, and a control group—covering 167 groups in Uganda and 144 in Malawi and over 2,400 individuals. The study measures impacts on financial inclusion, enterprise activity, consumption, and savings, with a core focus on women’s economic empowerment. Key WEE outcomes include financial privacy, decision-making power, resource autonomy, time use, confidence, and social cohesion. A mixed-methods design combining surveys, administrative data, and qualitative interviews enables the study to identify underlying mechanisms and trade-offs, such as whether improved access to credit strengthens women’s bargaining power or alters group cohesion. The analysis is anchored in the CGAP–IPA WEE measurement framework, ensuring systematic and comparable measurement of empowerment outcomes.
Proposed Impact
The project will generate rigorous evidence on whether and how linking savings groups to formal credit and digitizing their operations can advance women’s economic empowerment. Findings will directly inform program design and scale-up decisions for implementers such as World Vision, VisionFund, and DreamStart Labs, and will be highly relevant for donors and governments promoting group-based financial inclusion. If effective, these interventions could be scaled across World Vision’s multi-country THRIVE platform. More broadly, the study contributes to the academic and policy literature by clarifying how mechanisms such as privacy, transaction costs, bargaining power, and social cohesion mediate the relationship between digital finance and women’s empowerment, while piloting a standardized WEE measurement framework in the savings group context.
Photo by Mugabi Owen on Unsplash
