Dowa SLGs partners urged on collaboration

Dowa, March 11, Mana: Partners implementing Savings and Loan Groups (SLGs) interventions in Dowa have been urged to promote collaboration in order to improve both SLGs activities and lives of the poor and vulnerable people in the district.

Chief Community Development Officer in the Ministry of Gender, community development and social welfare, Aubet Mkwawira, made the remarks on Tuesday during a meeting with organisations implementing SLGs interventions in the district.

He said SLG activities have a potential to transform people’s lives, and are fast being adopted both in urban and rural setups. Also, more partners are integrating SLGs in their activities, hence the need to improve coordination.

"As one of way of harmonizing our work, we need to improve collaboration. So the meeting aims at strengthening district SLG network by sharing experiences, and for us to present current direction on SLGs from the central government, and explore how best we can move forward together.

"But we also want to enhance mapping of partners. We would like to know which partner is conducting which SLG activities and where they are, this will also improve coordination as we develop our Management Information System," said Mkwawira.

Mkwawira said the evolution of SLG from Village Savings and Loan groups was crucial as VSLs faced challenges like unclear framework for guidance which resulted in both poor coordination, capacity building and linkages to financial service providers.

"Now we have one approach which is SLGs, and we expect improved standards, harmony and sanity, and as such we have SLG guidelines for all partners.

"One key component we would like to see is data generation and management, as such we also need to have a harmonized data collection tool to guide our activities," he said.

Amongst others he said these will also improve transparency and accountability.

He however said there are still other challenges facing coordination amongst partners implementing SLGs including inadequate sensitisation on SLGs, resistance from some partners in having a harmonized approach in SLGs, and lack of resources to support district network meetings.

In his remarks, Senior Technical Advisor, Monitoring Evaluation and Learning at Care International, Clement Bisayi, said collaboration will also enhance information sharing which is crucial for the success of SLGs.

"We have success stories under SLGs but we also have some sad stories happening. For example, when members are joining an SLG, they have expectations that SLGs will help them change their lives and acquire various skills in financial management.

"But we are also aware of others who have lost assets, families disrupted due to their participation in SLGs. So, we also need to look at all these and learn from each other how we can minimize these issues," said Bisayi.

Bisayi also urged the partners to strategize how they can use the data they have to influence financial institutions to come up with products which can help the groups, without the services being exploitative.

In her remarks, District Community Development Officer for Dowa, Stella Mvalo, said the district is recording success in SLGs, both under government and non-governmental affiliation.

She said the district has 14 notable partners like World Vision, World Relief, COMSIP Climate Smart Enhanced Public Works project, TAPP/TRANSFORM, Feed the Children, Invest in Early Years project and GENET amongst others, which are actively involved in SLGs.

"Currently in total we have 2,999 groups and 60,678 participants in SLGs. Of these, 44,841 are females, and 16,233 are males. In terms of revenue, these groups currently have total savings and share outs of over MK2.972 billion as of December 2024.

"So from this, we can see that SLG interventions in the district are working out well, but we need to strengthen our coordination with partners," she said.