Financial inclusion in rural Malawi
Recently, I had the opportunity to visit several locations in rural Malawi in southern Africa, to study different initiatives towards financial inclusion. This was part of my collaboration with a UK based organization called Rural Inclusion , and its implementation partner, CADECOM ( Caritas Malawi ). This activity was supported by a grant from the Frontiers Programme of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering. Rural Inclusion, as an organization, works with several Community Based Organizations (CBO) in multiple countries to provide training on financial literacy through their platform named Ostrii. The CBOs in turn work with several communities to impart this training as well as assess impact on the ground. As part of our visit, we interacted with several communities in the Dedza region, and the Ntchisi region of Malawi. Communities in these places had organized themselves to create informal banking systems called VSLA (Village Savings and Lending Association), where community member