Savings & Credit Schemes
SAVINGS AND CREDITS SCHEMES.
Saving and credit has been a very significant approach in organizing the community. This facilitates the access of financial services to the poor community living in informal settlements, of which majority cannot access the loans from financial institutions like banks due to different reasons including high interest rates and lack of collateral, and creating the solidarity in solving community challenges.
The community savings starts from the organized groups within the settlements which form up a network of many saving groups known as Tanzania Urban poor federation.
The community saving and credit groups enables the access of loans with low interest rates, the convenience to accessing loans even during emergencies cases as members are neighbors. The saving group goes beyond facilitating financial accessibility by creating cohesive community in solving challenges beyond finance such as the challenges of lack of services within the settlements. It also helps the access of information among community members.
There are two savings of daily savings and Jenga Fund. The two savings aims at different purposes where by daily savings is for enabling individual member to have access of loan to solve individual problems such as establishing small business, paying school fees for children and so on, while the JENGA fund which is a revolving fund aims at serving larger community development projects such provision of water and sanitation, and using the fund for leveraging more funding from stakeholders. Currently the federation has managed to save a total of 185,157 USD for daily savings and 28,079.53 USD for JENGA fund.