What Savings Products Do People Want? Short Exploratory Study in Tamil Nadu

The purpose of this document is to show how people manage to save in the most difficult of conditions, it is important to consider that these same people still use the money lender or other sources of expensive credit when they do not have a proper and formal way of saving, like buying insurance or asking for a bank loan. In this context we’ve also added at the end of this document a small section that addresses the major need for saving products that we found. This section will provide more questions than answers and will open the door for further research in the micro savings world.

The following section discusses the methodology used for the study and the manner in which we went about collecting information. The results of our study are then presented in two parts. The stress is more on informal savings mechanisms than formal mechanisms because the former is relatively less known. The first part of the results explains the different informal means of savings that we discovered among our respondents and the information that they provided about these. Some of the following information in the informal savings category need not necessarily come under the technical category of savings products, but we feel that this information is valuable to understanding rural economic systems. The latter part of the discussion on results discusses the different formal sources of savings and the prevalence of these amongst our respondents.

Download the research paper here.