In collaboration with Oxfam America and Freedom from Hunger, IPA is conducting a study to measure the impact of the Saving for Change program that gives poor people more financial control over their futures by greatly improving on ROSCAS. The project helps to create saving groups of about 20 women where members meet and save regularly and the collected funds provide interest bearing loans to group members. At the end of the cycle, the fund is divided equally among the group members.

The study will measure both the impact of different implementation strategies as well as replication and spillover patterns, as the Saving for Change program is explicitly designed to spread beyond the borders of the village in which it was originally introduced. Our evaluation design addresses this complication by defining multiple treatment and control groups in order to decouple spillover effects from the counterfactual status quo.

 This study includes a total of 600 villages, and those in the treatment group are randomly selected to receive one of multiple treatments (for example, varying by the intensity of the training that village replicators receive). To analyze replication/spillover issues, two control groups are formed. A first control group will consist of villages that are in the immediate vicinity of treatment villages and are thus likely to see saving and credit groups expand into their areas through spontaneous replication. A second control group will consist of villages that are farther apart and are thus unlikely to be influenced by the program. By using a range of socioeconomic measures, the study determines the impact of Saving for Change as a whole as well as the most economical and most effective way of spreading the project.