Where the Cycle Begins  

For women in Mexico’s rural villages, many factors contribute to the cycle of poverty. Research shows that financial savings are a powerful tool for poverty reduction, particularly for the most underserved members of society. Unfortunately, there are few, if any, banking options available to those living in rural poverty due to a lack of collateral. Because of this, community members often lack the financial literacy to accrue savings.  

Introducing the WSGP   

To overcome devastating poverty and provide community members with the resources to save, CHOICE Humanitarian helped launch the Women’s Savings Group Program (WSGP) in Nuevo Valle, El Borrego, Peñitas Dos, and San Martin. Supported by the Trimble Foundation, the WSGP is a simple, community-owned savings and loan program where women save together and borrow from their joint savings to fund personal, business, and development needs.  

In the first six weeks of the program, CHOICE’s front-line employees, known as Rural Development Facilitators, identified and organized a cooperative of women who saved small sums into a joint fund held in a secure lockbox. Each WSGP participant had a personal savings bag within the box and was required to put money, no matter how small the amount, into the box each week.  

After six months, over 70 participants across these four rural communities began to work together to mitigate the barriers to female economic empowerment within their communities. They did this by allocating funds as needed toward three objectives:   

• Ensuring each woman and her family’s basic needs were met 
• Ensuring each woman and her family developed adequate food production   
• Enabling women in the community to start their own micro-enterprises so they could earn extra income and re-invest more money into the WSGP

Expansive participation in the WSGP resulted in amplified funding possibilities which permitted the majority of participants to choose to use their savings to build chicken coops and purchase chicks to raise for laying eggs. Each week, 50-85 eggs were harvested, allowing participants’ families to both consume and sell the produce for income.   

Over 2,500 individuals were impacted by the WSGP through the increase in economic opportunity for participants, with a few initial participants already achieving financial independence with their chicken businesses (a process that typically takes 4-5 years of consistent WSGP participation). 

With this program, the WSGP participants were able to break the cycle of poverty and replace it with a cycle of entrepreneurship and financial stability.