Community lending service that is changing lives of members

In one of it’s sub purpose, the MWENDO (Making Well Informed Efforts to Nurture Vulnerable OVC) Project aims at strengthening the capacity of household and communities to protect and care for OVC through caregiver’s engagement in savings and lending groups and financial linkages, among other interventions.
Savings and Internal Lending Communities (SILCs) are a type of community-based savings groups promoted by Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and it’s partners to strengthen the livelihoods of the people we serve.
SILCs builds on traditional savings practices, and benefit from the accumulated experience of savings group practitioners around the world. In order to scale up SILCs, CRS and Ace Africa has recruited and trained 14 community-based Field Agents who have been promoting SILC programs, train SILC members, and supervise SILCs for the last ne year. After the first share-out, the groups will be able to operate on their own.
While traditional Revolving Accumulating Savings and Loans Associations (ROSCAs) provide their members with an extremely simple and transparent way to build useful lump sums, they can form and spread without external assistance.
SILC is a self-selected group of people who pool their money into a fund, from which members can borrow. The money is paid back with interest, causing the fund to grow. These saving and borrowing activities take place during a cycle of pre-determined length (typically 8 to 12 months), at the end of which the funds are distributed to members in proportion to their total savings. Members are free to use the distributed lump sum as they wish, including reinvestment for another cycle. Additionally, SILCs contribute to a secondary fund (Social Fund) that caters for member emergencies.
SILC