SDG 1: No Poverty
SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth
“The conditions my children were living in were very bad,” says Amat, who is in Yemen, where 80 percent of people live below the poverty line. “I didn’t have a profession, and I couldn’t provide for myself or my family. We couldn’t save money to meet the children’s requirements for school. And I didn’t have a plan for how to improve our livelihoods.”
Amat’s words capture the harsh reality facing many who live in crisis settings. When an emergency strikes, critical support structures are often disrupted. In situations where crises fail to resolve, temporary disruptions can become more permanent, leaving the most vulnerable with few options or resources to care for themselves and their families.
For this reason, CARE has been piloting and refining a new program model based on our highly successful Village Savings and Loan Association (VSLA) program. In other contexts, VSLAs have proved to be an effective platform for supporting economic resilience, and the VSLA in Emergencies program, or VSLAiE, combines emergency cash assistance with adapted savings groups to help people in crisis settings build more stability for their futures.
The need for effective, adaptable support continues to grow, with over 300 million people around the world living in fragile contexts and nearly 26 million refugees fleeing conflict and scarcity. In these situations, financial service providers often cannot operate normally, if at all. Within crisis affected settings, more than 75 percent of adults remain outside the formal financial system. This lack of access to even the most basic savings facility harms the long-term economic resilience of already precarious communities.
Over the past two years, CARE has piloted the VSLAiE program in Jordan, Syria and Yemen, and results show that VSLAiE can be a powerful tool for livelihood recovery. Early evidence suggests these results can sustain themselves over time, offering longer- term resilience for highly vulnerable communities. In fact, VSLAiE is fast becoming a staple of the humanitarian portfolios in CARE country offices, serving as a bridge between emergency and development programming. CARE knows that in a crisis context, combining cash assistance with VSLA membership contributes, on average, to an additional 30-35 percent increase in food security, 70-85 percent increase in incomes, and a twelve-fold increase in savings.
For Amat, joining a VSLA proved to be a turning point for her and her family. In addition to helping her save, being part of a VSLA gave her the ability to open a business of her own.
“I took a loan and bought a bakery which I used to make sweets. And here I am. I am a producer!” Amat shares. “It was a big thing for me to have this success. I have my own business so I can help my family members. I use my time fruitfully, and I’ve acquired skills and have savings.”
These VSLAiE pilots have generated enormous interest in the model and the adaptation of VSLAs in emergency settings. To build on this success, CARE will scale VSLAiEs in new regions beyond the Middle East, including Latin America and the Caribbean and East and Southern Africa. CARE will also publish and share the VSLAiE toolkit and model with other humanitarian actors to ensure this innovative programming achieves the greatest reach and impact possible.
Interested in learning more? Reach out to us at impact@care.org, and we’ll be in touch soon.
