The Gates Foundation is to award $11 million to international humanitarian NGO CARE for an initiative to provide financial services to poor households in rural Africa. Funded through the Foundation’s Financial Services for the Poor initiative, the Save Up programme will bring some 300,000 people, 70 per cent of them women, into village savings and loan associations in rural areas and urban slums in Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda. The benefits of the programme are likely to be much more widely felt, explains CARE president and CEO Helen Gayle: ‘CARE’s experience is that when women have the tools to save and invest, whole communities benefit,’ she said, adding: ‘The challenge has been to implement that successful strategy on a larger scale in a sustainable way.’

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