Project planning tool

The Savings Project Planning Tool allows the user to design a savings group project. By entering simple descriptive criteria and estimating Field Officer and Village Agent productivity, the user is able to know:

• how many operational staff are needed at different stages of a project’s timeline,
• where those staff are needed and in what numbers
• how to use these outputs to create a budget.

Where Village Agents are used in a programme, the tool computes the total number of groups and members that it believes will be created beyond the life of the project. It then adjusts cost-per-member calculations accordingly. This is increasingly important: research has shown that VSLAs self-replicate when programmes come to an end. This reduces the effective cost per person (the average spontaneous replication rate, independent of Village Agents, is about 1.6 per foundation group, but this is not modelled in the tool).