Events

In 2014, Catholic Relief Services (CRS) launched a two-year Financial Diaries project in Kasama, the capital of Zambia’s Northern Province, to understand the experience of low-income households that participated in the organization’s Savings and Internal Lending Communities (SILCs or SILC groups). The project included 270 households. The households were very poor—roughly 96 percent of SILC households and 92 percent of comparison households lived below the International Poverty Line of $1.90 per person per day. CRS asked Microfinance Opportunities (MFO) to analyze the Financial Diaries data to answer a series of research questions about the SILC program. Broadly, CRS had four categories of research questions:

• Income, Expenditures, and Financial Tool Use

• SILC Use and Poverty

• Managing Cash Flow

• Gender and Economic Activity