Women of Hope: How Community Savings Groups Are Changing Lives Across Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone's Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment (GEWE) policy is blunt about the problem: "Women are the majority among the poorest of the poor... They find it very difficult to obtain loans for larger business ventures due to rigid and sometimes gender-based discriminatory conditions." LEWAF's Community Women's Savings and Loaning Association (CWSLA) model was built directly in response.

How It Works

LEWAF starts with community meetings, explaining its mandate and the CWSLA concept to local stakeholders and residents. Interested women — typically around 98 percent of attendees — commit to three simple principles: join a group, attend a weekly meeting to save voluntarily, and abide by the group's own constitution. Each group receives a toolkit — a metal box, individual passbooks, ledgers, padlocks, a calculator, and money bags — so that even a woman who cannot read or write can track exactly how much she has saved or borrowed.

Groups meet weekly for 48 weeks, during which members have easy access to loans for small business ventures or emergencies. At the end of the cycle comes the share-out: every leone saved, every loan interest earned, and even small fines collected (for late arrival, a phone ringing in a meeting) are pooled and distributed among the members — a joyous, often tearful, celebration day.

The Numbers

Through a 2024–2025 Service Level Agreement with the Ministry of Gender and Children's Affairs, LEWAF enrolled 1,009 women into 20 savings groups across 13 communities in Western Area Urban and Rural — generating NLe 3,056,673 (about $132,898) in group savings, with 1,005 women benefiting directly from loans. Beyond the CWSLA groups themselves, an internal "social fund" that members build with small weekly contributions has supported 88 women through funeral costs, weddings, naming ceremonies, house fires, and flood damage.

Ester Turay, of the Bondayella ("One Family") group in Grafton, has spent seven years building her family home using income from her savings group: "Once you have a plan and the opportunity is available to you, it's a blessing in disguise. Make the most of it when you are alive."

It is, as one Family Support Unit officer put it in an earlier LEWAF report, deceptively simple: "the existence of an identifiable office space and the legal status of LEWAF has proven to be an existential glamour of hope and credibility" — giving women the confidence to trust a system that, for once, is built for them.