Big goals, individual action: how women create change

Think progress is impossible??Salamatou?Dagnogo?and?Fati?Abdou in C?te d’Ivoire urge us to think again.?Between 2015 and 2020, CARE and our partners in 81 countries have contributed to change for 157 million people . It’s a number that reflects the actions of many, many remarkable people – those like?Salamatou?and?Fati?who start with individual initiative, and then invite others to join. Eventually you’ve got a movement of thousands, then millions.?Salamatou?first joined a savings group in Niger, after she found herself penniless and stranded there by her abusive husband. After 18 months,?Salamatou?used her earnings to purchase a bus ticket back home to C?te d’Ivoire where she was reunited with her children. Knowing the difference that this?savings group made to her life, she began thinking about bringing the model to women in her own country. She approached her friend?Fati?Abdou, a community educator at the local CARE office, who she suspected would support the idea.?

“I used nights and weekends with?Salamatou?to start groups and prove that savings changed more than just women’s income,”?Fati?says. “We knew we could do more.”?Salamatou?founded 150 groups herself. Between them,?Salamatou?and?Fati?have helped more than 260,000 women across C?te d’Ivoire start saving and begin to build futures.?The groups are about much more than just savings. “People who knew me before — they now see the difference in my life,”?Salamatou?says. “But it’s not me alone. My story is the same for a lot of women. We help?ourselves, and we change our situation.”???

The impact is wider than C?te d’Ivoire, or even West Africa. In 2020,?Fati?visited CARE’s office in Atlanta to teach staff how savings groups can work to support women in the United States. Today we lean on her practical wisdom as we partner to launch savings groups in our own backyard.