Finance MEC Ina Cronje, SaveAct board member Ilan Lax and Mkhambathini Mayor Thobekile Maphumulo handed out certificates at a lively graduation ceremony involving about 300 members of SaveAct-led savings and credit groups from the Table Mountain area on May 12, 2011 in the Maqongqo Community Hall. The ceremony was held under the auspices of the KZN Financial Literacy Association.

Reflections on the Table Mountain graduation, 12 May, 2011

Anton Krone, Executive Director, SaveAct 

Today is a special day, a day of celebration of the resourcefulness of ordinary people who live outside of mainstream economic opportunities. 

Women and a few men in Maqonqo have grasped opportunities offered to them to be trained in a unique savings methodology originating from NGO work in Africa. Through their participation they report experiencing a sense of empowerment, a sense of agency over their lives. In this area of Table Mountain and Maqongqo there are already well over 1 000 women and 163 men, including young men who have joined savings groups. And they all sing a common tune, that they have been able to assume control over their household budgets, that they have been able find funds for school fees, and have begun to shed dependence on loans sharks. 

Graduands at the SaveAct graduation ceremony listen to the keynote address by Finance MEC Ina Cronje

Members of savings groups experience profound changes in their lives. They develop their self-esteem and work together to help each other cope with challenges and adversity. And this they do, after initial training and mentorship, entirely on their own. This is what we celebrate today: the moment at which 10 savings groups achieve their independence from that support process, the moment at which they graduate as well-functioning savings groups capable of sustaining their activities into the future. There are few development or service delivery interventions that can culminate in such an outcome. It is something to celebrate, pause over; and to contemplate the opportunities for ordinary people if such work was to be scaled up around the country. Not just thousands, but hundreds of thousands more people, could benefit from this kind of programme given the right conditions to enable it to spread. 

SaveAct staff and village promoters are to be congratulated for their hard work in training 65 groups in this community. Further afield in KwaZulu-Natal there are now 250 groups totalling more than 5 000 members. SaveAct welcomes this event as an opportunity to share this experience with others in the province. It comes at a time when SaveAct is gearing towards scaling up this programme in KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape. SaveAct is convinced that this programme provides important answers to the challenge of how to enable the rural poor, especially women, to assume control of their lives and initiate, on the back of their savings platform, the kinds of self-employment strategies that national government seeks to secure. The signs are there and the potential is enormous.

Finance MEC Ina Cronje visited a spaza shop run by Table Mountain resident Ms Sizani Ngubane  (also pictured at top). Since becoming a member of a SaveAct-promoted savings and credit group in 2009, Ms Ngubane has been able to borrow money to increase her stock and improve the shop's storage facilities and capacity.

At the same time, SaveAct does not wish to portray this programme as the solution to rural poverty. Many other important support systems and strategies are needed to tackle this complex and challenging issue. Government and the private sector have important roles to fulfil in complementing programmes such as this one. Government and the private sector need to work with NGOs to tackle the poverty and extreme inequalities that plague our country. This situation threatens our stability and future as a young, inclusive nation. If we are to succeed in integrating our society, building an inclusive economy and eradicating the social ills, we have to work together at many levels: in villages, at local and district level, across our provinces and up to the level of national policies. We have to recognise amongst ourselves our respective strengths and work in ways that complement each other. 

We welcome the initiative of the KZN Treasury to launch a financial literacy association embracing major stakeholders. It is recognition of the importance of developing ways of working together. This initiative brings hope and opportunity. There is much work still needed to make it succeed. We need an honest and respectful dialogue for a partnership to develop and flourish. We need to be practical and realistic about what we can do. We need (just like the economy) a predictable and supportive environment within which to innovate and build, bit by bit, effective programmes that make a difference amongst women and other vulnerable groups. 

SaveAct wishes to thank its board members for their commitment to the vision of a better society, to their willingness to give freely of their time. This is deeply appreciated. Without the foreign donor partners that played such an important role in enabling us to fight apartheid and who have stayed with us to enable us to find innovative strategies to fight poverty and exclusion, this work would not have been possible. Our thanks thus go to the Ford Foundation for the founding grant, and five years of support. To the many other donors, Misereor from Germany, Vesper Society from the US, the Embassy of Finland, the European Union, the NDA, Hanef Bhamjee, and some of the more recent programmes emanating from provincial and national government, we give our thanks. Please stay with the journey of building a better country.

- Anton Krone, Executive Director, SaveAct