Innovating for Resilience

There is growing evidence that savings groups can be an essential source of financial resilience,  particularly with regards to absorptive resilience capacity – helping buffer shocks by providing both financial support and social capital. Beyond their classic financial functions, CRS‘ Savings and Internal Lending Communities (SILC) have shown the potential to embrace innovation – from integrating gender and social cohesion programming, to SILC private service providers (PSPs) building a supply chain for agricultural inputs and access to the market, to SILC members encouraging each other to purchase health microinsurance – and may become sources of adaptive and transformative capacities as well.

In this research, set within the CRS STaR project in Northeastern Nigeria, we used a participatory research and design approach to explore financial resilience with SILC group members and field agents.