Battambang, KH – Savings program helps purchase school supplies – 1 Jan 2015

CBL used savings to buy school materials for his five children as well as some kitchen tools for his home.

In 2015, Healthy Life Garden Shop implemented two savings programs for its employees.

The first program has savings deducted directly from payroll, and paid out to the employees every six months. For the first half of the year CBL used his savings of US$72 to buy school uniforms, textbooks, notebooks, and pens.

The second savings program is a rotating savings group, where each of the six group member contributes US$5 every two weeks.  A total of US$30 is collected each time, and the members take it in turn to receive the US$30 savings.  Every time the cycle rotates to CBL, he has been putting aside money to buy a piece of land so that he can build a home for his large family and have space to keep livestock for extra income.

Savings programs like these are important to developing countries because it teaches people that they can achieve their goals without any outside help.  This means that they will not need to take high interest loans from lenders that are focused on maximizing profit.