In 2022, before women's economic empowerment was formally one of our five program pillars, a group of eleven women in one section of Gituamba began meeting informally under a mango tree to contribute small weekly savings and lend to each other on rotation, an arrangement that predates our organization but that several of our founding members were part of personally.
As word spread and more women asked to join, the original group faced a familiar problem for growing savings circles: a group that gets too large becomes harder to manage on trust alone, harder to track contributions accurately, and slower to reach consensus on loan requests.
Rather than let the original group swell indefinitely, we helped split growing interest into additional, similarly-sized groups across different sections of Gituamba, each running independently but sharing a common simple record-keeping template and access to the same volunteer training on basic bookkeeping and conflict resolution.
“We did not set out to build a network. We just kept saying yes when more women wanted to save together, and eventually we had five groups and needed a way to support all of them properly.”
— Founding committee member
By 2025, the network had grown to five groups, and this year two of them completed formal registration as self-help groups, opening access to government-linked funds, a milestone covered in a separate story on this page.
We continue to support new groups forming organically, and any group of Gituamba women interested in starting a similar circle is welcome to request our basic starter guide through the Contact page.
Your donation or volunteer hour goes directly into work like the story above — not overhead.
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