Throw away your old training manuals! Yes, you!

Hugh Allen has done more than anyone else to spread the idea of savings groups. In fact, anyone reading this site owes a debt of gratitude for Hugh’s vision and work over the last couple of decades.

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Hugh’s company, VSL Associates, has produced a stream of revisions to their training manuals that have been adopted and adapted by countless NGOs around the world. I have seen his manuals being passed around like photocopied holy writ in African villages by people who have no idea who wrote them. Hugh is a sponge and keeps absorbing new ideas, and his manuals have swung like a pendulum over the years, from more to less proscriptive, with shifting emphasis. Always useful, though not always grounded in practical reality, as evidenced by the fact that savings group members abandon many of the recommended practices as soon as their trainer leaves them alone. To his credit, Hugh would be the first to admit that he occasionally makes errors that unfortunately can become embedded into program orthodoxy.

Hugh has made a new site, and it’s a beauty. Same address: https://www.vsla.net but apparently all new. And the manuals are new also, and what an extraordinary list he now offers: In addition to the familiar Field Officer and Village Agent training guides (now in five languages!), there are two new manuals: One for federations, and one based on CARE’s SPM (select, plan, manage) curriculum, for Income Generating Activities, or IGAs.

I admit it: I am super skeptical of both federations and IGAs, and I tend to see them both as unnecessary add-ons and a way for groups to lose money. However, I also admit that they are things that groups like to do themselves, and Hugh’s guides are full of caveats and caution, based on experience of what has worked and more importantly of what hasn’t worked. So it is very good that these manuals exist, and we should celebrate that, and, I’m serious, throw away your old manuals and go with all these new ones.

By the way, thanks for coming to Savings Revolution so that we can link you to the VSL Associates site. Our friends at the Mango Tree, who call themselves “The Global Resource on Savings Groups”, somehow fail to include a link to the VSL Associates site. Or this site. Hm.