Building Bridges to Financial Inclusion in Burkina Faso

Cost, Revenue, Performance and Effectiveness Analysis of Rural Mobile Savings Accounts

There is currently a large number of Savings Groups (SG) in sub- Saharan Africa and the number is still growing thanks to the work of international NGOs such as CARE, Plan, CRS, Freedom from Hunger and Oxfam America. For the majority of SG members this experience represents their very first access to a financial service in the form of savings (safer place to store their meager assets) or loan to invest in small income-generating activities or to simply smooth their consumption. Linking them to formal financial institutions such as banks, microfinance institutions or credit unions has been a key strategy to help them to migrate from a situation of informal and non transparent economy to a formal and transparent one.

In Burkina, the Réseau des Caisses Populaires du Burkina (RCPB) et La Société pour le Financement de la Petite Entreprise (SOFIPE), under the UNCDF Microlead Expansion program pilot-tested two innovative sustainable SG financial linkages with the technical assistance of Freedom from Hunger. The two MFIs approached the challenge as the implementation of a sustainable mechanism of small savings collection in rural areas. Their approach include a three-pronged strategy: (i) leveraging a proven1 community-based savings groups methodology enabling poor rural women to save and gather their small savings, (ii) designing an adapted a formal savings account accessible to rural SG via mobile technologies and (iii) developing and exposing SG to mobile-based financial literacy sessions.2 Despite a great similarity in the two institutions approach, there is a difference in their service delivery strategies. While SOFIPE decided to leverage an existing digital platform and agents network offered by Airtel Money 3 the largest mobile money promoter in the country, RCPB decided to use their own platform (Intercaisses) and deployed their own network of agents.

The full integration of these models into the MFIs operations depends on their sustainability in the long term and their cost- effectiveness. The current case study aims to analyze the costs and revenues pertaining to the implementation of the models in the context of each institution in order to draw some lessons for other financial institutions interested to adopt similar strategies to reach out to poor rural women with savings services.