« Poverty Outreach in fee-for-service Savings Groups »

CRS has just published its first research paper, ‘Poverty Outreach in fee-for Service Savings Groups’, coming from their large-scale Randomized Control Trial. The key findings were that their SILC groups are indeed reaching the very poor, and that is so both if the community has to pay for services (PSP approach) or not (FA approach).
It shows that market-based delivery systems can reach poor people at scale.

The market-based PSP delivery channel has allowed CRS to drastically reduce the costs of going to scale and CRS had the lowest cost per member within the industry as measured on SAVIX ($17.7 cost/member - Ref. SAVIX database, September 30, 2011).

Comments

[Hugh Allen]

I highly recommend the CRS SILC Innovations Research Brief No. 1 "Poverty outreach in fee-for-service savings groups"

Note to the reader: A PSP is a fee-for-service trainer. An FA is a paid trainer (who later muitates into a PSP)

Key findings

• Poverty outreach is deep— as many as 64% of SILC members are below National Poverty Lines—though variable across the project due to geographic targeting.
• Over two-thirds of group members in Kenya and Tanzania fell below the $1.25/day poverty line, as did nearly 40 percent of members in Uganda.
• There was no significant difference in depth of poverty outreach between the PSP- and FA-supported SILC members on the endline.
• Filtering for households that joined SILC groups during the research interval (after fee-for-service status was assigned and clear) revealed no statistical difference between PSP- and FA-supported SILC segments.
• The SILC sample is statistically equivalent to the non-SILC sample, even when examined for quartile distribution—in other words, the project is serving a cross-section of typical rural villagers.
• PSP-supported SILC groups showed greater resiliency compared to FA-supported groups in a context of economic decline.

Since FAs become PSPs it's not altogether surprising that they perform roughly as well as paid staff, but significant that groups formed by PSPs do better when tiomes are tough. Recommended reading.

[Jill Thompson]

Bravo Guy!

CRS has come a loooong way in this field since I worked there (South Africa 2001 - 2004)