Hrishipara

Many observers ofSafeSave wondered whether its business plan - sending Collectors daily to every client - could work in the countryside as well as in the slums.

In 2002 CGAP, a club of microfinance donors housed at the World Bank, and PLAN, an international NGO that had been the first investor inSafeSave, teamed up with Rutherford to finance a rural adaptation of SafeSave.

The site for the experiment was Hrishipara, a small village about 90 minutes drive from the capital.

The Hrishipara experiment is now constituted as a cooperative MFI, Shohoz Shonchoy (Bengali for Easy Savings). Chaired by Shameem and managed by Kalimullah, it has nine Collectors and a Data Clerk.

Whereas SafeSave aims to grow, taking the Poor and Their Money ideas to as many clients as possible, the Hrishipara experiment is kept deliberately small, so as to test a number of different products.

That doesn`t mean that Hrishipara is unsustainably small. With around 2000 clients, it has been making a surplus each month since late 2003.

from left: Collector Anwara, Manager Kalimullah, former Chairman S K Sinha and Collector Shobha

All four have been working at Hrishipara since it began in April 2002