Quality of Delivery Study

This study assesses the outreach, value added, and consumer protection of project-formed and locally-formed savings-groups (SGs) in Western Kenya. It measures the outreach of SGs with respect to how many people are members of SGs and to what extent these SGs are reaching the principal target population of poor and otherwise excluded people. The study also evaluates the consumer protection aspect of SGs with respect to transparency and risk of losing savings, or savers being exploited in other ways. Key findings include:

• Outreach of project-formed SGs was 39%, while locally-formed SGs reached only 23% of households in their respective areas;
• For most members, SGs seem to provide a safe and transparent place to save with 88% of group members reporting that they were satisfied with the annual shareout;
• About 15% of members leave their group and the most common reasons given for dropping out of groups are “inability to save” and a variety of issues related to group quality and functioning;
• Compared with project-formed groups, locally-formed groups have poor attendance, save less, lend to fewer members, have the smallest shareouts, are and have the highest percentage of members who say they have lost money in their groups.