Evaluating the impact of Financial Education through Umurenge Savings and Credit Cooperatives (Umurenge SACCOs) in Rwanda: Randomized Field Experiment

This study evaluates the impact of financial education, delivered through Umurenge SACCOs, on clients’ financial knowledge, skills, attitudes, behavior, and overall welfare using a clustered randomized evaluation, and also measures the impact of different training approaches to identify ways to optimize the training of educators.

The financial education program was developed by MINECOFIN with consultation from World Bank and the advisory firm Enclude, Ltd. It provides in-depth training, curriculum materials, resources, and supervision to SACCO members on a long-term, sustainable basis. A “rules of thumb” methodology emphasizes key messages that are simple, actionable, and memorable. The central theme of the curriculum is the phrase “Nawe Birakureba” or “It’s up to you!” which is meant to encourage members to take charge of their own finances and financial futures. Clients follows a typical, Rwandan family and neighborhood, who face everyday financial issues and solve them through 5-8 minutes dramatic skits.

Each SACCO is expected to train at least 500 participants over the period of one year in groups of 30 participants. Each group will attend six weekly sessions, with 20 groups receiving training over the year. Training will take place at local SACCOs for 45-60 minutes once a week.

2016-08-16

2016-12-06

Selected key outcomes of interest are:

- Use of budget / savings plan (from survey data)
- Know responsibilities of SACCO membership (from survey data)
- Prevalence and rate of formal savings (from survey & SACCO reporting data)
- Account dormancy rate (from SACCO reporting data)
- NPL rate (from SACCO reporting data)

Researchers will evaluate impact of the training received after three months and nine months, via face-to-face surveys with SACCO members, as well as data from the SACCOs themselves. Researchers have randomly assigned 200 SACCOs (4,000 individual clients), to different groups. About 130 SACCOs will participate in the first phase of the intervention and 70 more SACCOs will that will receive the training in later phases will serve as comparison SACCOs in the first phase.
The first phase of the impact evaluation will assess the effectiveness of the program in improving the financial capabilities of SACCO members. The results will inform the design and implementation of later phases.

Researchers will evaluate impact of the training received after three months and nine months, via face-to-face surveys with SACCO members, as well as data from the SACCOs themselves.
Researchers will randomly assign 200 SACCOs (4,000 individual clients), to three groups:
• Group 1: SACCO clients will receive the full financial education program. The course will be taught by three members from each SACCO, who will be selected by SACCO staff and trained to teach the program. 65 SACCOs
• Group 2: SACCO clients will receive the full financial education program. The course will be taught by a manager and loan officer from each SACCO, and a community member, who will all be trained to teach the program. 65 SACCOs
• Group 3: These SACCOs will serve as a comparison group, and will only receive training after the study is complete. 70 SACCOs

The first phase of the impact evaluation will assess the effectiveness of the program in improving the financial capabilities of SACCO members. The results will inform the design and implementation of later phases.

Randomization using stata do-file.

The unit of randomization is an Umurenge Savings and Credit Cooperative (SACCO).

Yes

200 SACCOs.

4000 individual clients of SACCO.

65 treatment 1, 65 treatment 2, 70 control

Accounting for sample design and clustering, the minimum detectable effect size (in standard deviations) for main outcomes is 0.70. • Number of randomized groups (J): 200 • Proportion treated: 0.67 • Number of individuals per randomized group (n): 20 • Intra-cluster correlation: 0.13