From savings to credit: What it really takes to make finance work for women and youth
By Iannina Canessa
Contributors: WFP Rwanda country office, Lucy Bloxham
Rwanda has made financial inclusion a national priority, recognizing its role in economic transformation, poverty reduction, and the empowerment of women and young people. The country has expanded access to formal financial services and digital finance, but the challenge is no longer only about access. It is increasingly about making finance usable, relevant, and responsive to the realities of women and youth, especially those in informal work, rural areas, and savings groups.
This focus is reflected in Rwanda’s Women and Girls’ Access to Finance Strategy 2025–2030, which emphasizes that inclusive finance must go beyond account ownership and credit availability. It must also address product design, financial capability, and the structural barriers that still limit women’s and girls’ ability to use finance effectively.
For many women and young people, savings groups and Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) remain an important entry point into the financial system. Yet moving from saving to borrowing, from informal to formal finance, requires more than access. It requires products and partnerships that align with how these groups actually manage money. This is where the real work of financial inclusion begins.
SheCan is WFP’s financial inclusion and economic empowerment approach, supporting women and youth to access financial services, strengthen financial capability, and build pathways to entrepreneurship. In Rwanda, the approach is implemented under the Shora Neza project, in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation and led by the WFP Rwanda Country Office. Over the past year, WFP has expanded the programme significantly, reaching more than fifty thousand participants through cooperatives and youth-led savings groups.
This expansion has already translated into tangible results on the ground. Financial literacy training has equipped participants with stronger budgeting, saving, and investment skills, while internal VSLA lending has become an important entry point into finance: groups have mobilized substantial savings and are actively issuing loans to their members, increasingly for income-generating activities such as farming, small businesses, and livestock. This shift toward productive use of internal finance reflects growing financial capability, confidence, and entrepreneurial orientation among participants.
Financial literacy results have been strong. But as the programme has matured, a harder challenge has become clear: moving from successful savings into actual management of formal finance.
That challenge was at the center of a planning workshop held in March 2026 with our implementing and financial partners, including World Relief Rwanda and Equity Bank. The discussions were practical and candid. They helped us identify what was working, what was not, and sharpen our approach to building a finance pathway that works for women and youth groups.
Here are three lessons that stand out.
1. A good financial product is not enough if the design does not fit the customer
Product fit matters as much as affordability.
Under the current programme, Equity Bank’s product, supported by a development financing facility, is among the most affordable lending options available to SheCan groups. That matters. But affordability alone did not solve the problem. For many savings groups, the product structure was still difficult to use, particularly because of the 30 percent compulsory savings requirement.
The profiling work carried out with 250 Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) showed that many groups were interested in borrowing for productive activities. In fact, 171 groups representing more than 4,700 members expressed interest in accessing loans within the next six months. But the same exercise also revealed a major mismatch: all of those groups reported that they could not meet the current savings deposit requirement.
What groups said they could realistically contribute was closer to 10 percent, not 30 percent. Which, for a savings group, is the difference between a product that is theoretically available and one that is actually usable.
This is not surprising. These are groups of young women, many of whom are only now reaching this level of savings for the first time in their lives. Requiring a 30 percent deposit from their hard-earned resources understandably creates hesitation and, in some cases, resistance. But beyond risk perception, the requirement also represents a binding constraint: many groups simply do not have sufficient savings to meet this threshold while maintaining their regular savings cycles and liquidity needs. In practice, locking in such a large share of group savings not only limits their ability to qualify for the loan, but also reduces the usefulness of the financing itself, as it restricts the capital available for productive investment.
This means that if a product does not reflect how groups actually manage money, uptake will remain low. No matter how strong the headline terms.
2. Financial inclusion is also about trust, cohesion, and readiness
The workshop made clear that the barriers are also social and behavioral.
Among the groups profiled, a significant share were not ready or not interested in borrowing at this stage. The most common concern was reluctance to accept the social guarantee requirement, where members share responsibility for the loan. Other reasons included long processing times, limited interest at that moment, and limited understanding of the product.
This points to something important: not every group that saves together is ready to borrow together.
Some groups have strong internal cohesion and a clear collective economic activity. Others are still building trust. In groups where members are not confident in one another, shared liability feels risky rather than empowering. Readiness for formal finance is not only about savings or documentation. It is also about confidence, relationships and collective purpose.
In practice, the next phase of SheCan will place greater emphasis on group readiness, trust-building and strengthening collective business activity. This reflects growing evidence from economic inclusion programmes that psychosocial factors, such as confidence, social cohesion, and aspiration, can be just as critical as financial inputs in enabling individuals to take up and effectively use economic opportunities.
3. Strong coordination is critical to successful partnerships
Even when partners share the same goals, implementation can become fragmented without strong coordination.
The workshop highlighted a familiar challenge in multi-stakeholder partnerships: communication does not always flow consistently across actors, roles are not always equally understood and joint outreach and follow-up can sometimes be uneven. In some cases, training has focused more heavily on group leaders than on the full membership. In others, local actors such as field officers, branch staff and community leaders have not been involved as fully as they could be.
These gaps can make the borrowing journey more difficult for groups. When information is inconsistent or responsibilities are unclear, groups may feel unsure about where to turn for support.
The client journey is more than a banking process. For a savings group, it often includes training, documentation, registration, onboarding, follow-up and troubleshooting. When these steps are not well coordinated, groups can end up carrying the burden themselves.
The workshop also identified practical ways to strengthen coordination. Recurrent meetings have helped partners stay aligned, while WhatsApp groups have made it easier for field officers to raise issues quickly with Equity HQ. Co-creation workshops have supported the operationalization of products, and technical assistance has helped partners navigate challenges more smoothly. Standardized reporting templates have also improved consistency and clarity across the partnership.
One of the clearest takeaways was that improving uptake depends not only on refining the product but also on strengthening coordination among WFP, World Relief Rwanda, Equity Bank and local actors so that groups receive clear, consistent support throughout the process.
What we are learning overall
Taken together, these lessons show that inclusive finance partnerships work best when they are adaptive.
That means being willing to revise product terms when the evidence shows a mismatch. It means investing in trust and readiness, not just pipeline generation. And it means coordinating better across institutions so that the client journey is coherent.
In Rwanda, the SheCan team and partners are building on and adapting what already exists. The project will continue working through Equity Bank’s CDAT facility, while seeking to adjust the current structure to better reflect VSLA realities. At the same time, WFP is exploring a reserve mechanism to reduce the effective savings burden on groups, strengthening readiness support and assessing the most suitable digitization pathway.
The lesson from Rwanda is relevant far beyond one country: inclusive finance works when partnerships listen, adapt, and improve continuously.
By Iannina Canessa
Contributors: Lucy Bloxham, WFP Rwanda country office
The WFP Innovation Accelerator sources, supports and scales high-potential solutions to end hunger worldwide. We provide WFP colleagues, entrepreneurs, start-ups, companies and non-governmental organizations with access to funding, mentorship, hands-on support and WFP’s global operations.
Find out more about us: http://innovation.wfp.org.
Subscribe to our e-newsletter.
Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn and watch our videos on YouTube.
