Empowerment in action: savings groups improving community water, sanitation, and hygiene services. Enterprise Development and Microfinance, March 2015.
Kaelyn DeVries, Alejandro Rizo, Project Concern International, Guatemala.
Savings groups (SGs) combined with social empowerment strategies can be used to engage communities meaningfully in addressing development challenges such as access to clean water and a functioning latrine. As participants in PCI’s SG initiative entitled Women Empowered (WE), women have independently identified WASH needs in their communities and have organized and carried out collective actions to improve their situation. This paper highlights results from a qualitative study in which PCI looked at SGs within two international development programmes in urban and rural Guatemala.
