Nanofinance going digital

The group-of-groups mechanism proposed by Savolution lies at the intersection of three different enabling environments or ecosystems, connecting different actors and services for a very specific purpose via an innovative platform. The Savolution Platform, as illustrated above, enables inter-group lending (or horizontal linkage) and generates a positive impact on the annual return on savings for SG members.

The journey of Savolution began in 2017 in Burkina Faso. Fortunat Diener, then country director for Swisscontact, was managing a development program financed by the Swiss government which included a Savings Groups component. Together with Jean-Paul Kiendrebeogo, and with the support of Hugh Allen, they revised the SG component of the program using the Market Systems Development (MSD) approach – formerly also known as M4P or Making Markets Work for the Poor.

Working together with one of the largest financial institutions in Burkina Faso, they managed to train 10.000 VSLA members in 1,5 years – a 7-fold increase in the number of beneficiaries compared to the initial project target. The “Mara Panga” project was a great success!

In addition to the SGs component, the project also included a new entrepreneurship training component for female micro-entrepreneurs. Using this innovative method to create Savings Groups, Fortunat and Jean-Paul studied SG’s financial cycles in depth and came to the conclusion that there is room for innovation. By using a social enterprise approach, our objective was to develop additional products and services for Savings Groups that would allow them to increase returns on their savings and create a “self-financing project”.

With the idea of creating a group-of-groups approach that would use excess money available at the end of the SG cycle as seed money for SGs at the start of their cycle, Fortunat developed the architecture of the Savolution Platform and the corresponding business model initially for Swisscontact Services AG in Zürich in 2019.

In 2020, Fortunat and Dirk Lebe co-founded Savolution AG, a Swiss private shareholding company, as a start-up and spin-off from the ideas developed in the field in Burkina Faso and on the desk in Zürich.

As CEO and founder of Savolution AG, in 2020 Fortunat graduated from the Founder Institute Zürich, a Silicon-based start-up accelerator, and obtained a 300,000 USD grant from the Mastercard Foundation to implement a pilot project in Ghana within the framework of the “Savings at the frontier” program, in partnership with a local fintech company.

Unfortunately, the partnership did not work out and the pilot for the proof of concept never took off. But the founders gained stimulating local market insights and learned a lot of valuable lessons from their mistakes.

Reborn from the ashes in 2024, Savolution took the form of an NGO with a start-up spirit. Based in Geneva, Switzerland and incorporated as an association under Swiss law, Savolution is now following its new action-research approach strategy.

Our aim is to modify the business model using the lessons learned in Ghana and implement it to support Savings Groups and SG Federations, allowing them to make their money work harder for them. We are starting with an NGO approach based on grant financing, but our long-term objective is to evolve into a social enterprise that can sustainably self-finance through the services and products offered to our beneficiaries. Our philosophy is to use an action-research approach in order to guarantee robustness and trust.