Our story

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 VSLA component. Together with Jean-Paul Kiendrebeogo, they revised the VSLA component of the programme 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 – a 7-fold increase in the number of beneficiaries compared to the initial project target. The “Mara Panga” project was a great success!

Using this innovative method to create VSLA groups, Fortunat and Jean-Paul studied VSLA financial cycles in depth and came to the conclusion that there is room for more innovation. Using a social enterprise approach, our objective was to develop additional products and services for VSLA groups that would allow them to increase the returns on their savings.

With the idea of creating a group-of-the-group approach, where excess money at the end of the VSLA group cycle could be used as seed money for VSLA groups at the begging of their cycle, Fortunat developed the idea of a “digital bank” for VSLA groups and designed the corresponding business model initially for Swisscontact Services AG in Zürich in 2019.

In 2020, together with his co-founder Dirk Lebe, Fortunat created 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, a Silicon-based start-up accelerator and obtained a 300,000 USD grant from the Mastercard Foundation to implement a pilot project in Ghana, in the framework of the “Savings at the Frontier” programme, in joint venture 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, being incorporated as an association according to Swiss law, based in Geneva, Switzerland.

Our aim is to move forward based on lessons learned in the past, to implement a business model that will support VSLA groups and VSLA federations and make their money work harder for them.

Our objective is to start with an NGO approach, based on grant financing, but to evolve in the mid- and long-term into a social enterprise that is able to sustainably self-finance through services and products provided to our beneficiaries.