In Camp-Perrin, in the South department, Chrismène Laureus Jusné is a teacher at a public school, a trader, and now president of a community savings group. Married, she lives with her husband, her children, and her father, and also cares for an additional child within her household.

Before joining this group, she had never known this kind of initiative. The early days were marked by waiting and impatience within the group, before trust took hold with the arrival of the promised equipment.

A savings activity that became a real economic lever

The group began buying shares in the first week of January, soon reaching six months of activity. For Chrismène herself, savings quickly became a credit tool: she is now on her third loan, having repaid the first two.

“I took out a first loan, I paid it off, thank God. I took out a second one, and now I’m on my third loan. I borrow to strengthen my small business.”

“We don’t consider ourselves outsiders”

She points out that in her group, almost everyone runs a small trade.

“Everyone you see here is someone who hustles: they run small trades… some sell phone cards, others sell small radios in the street… I myself sit here selling small retail goods… some sell soft drinks, all of that creates a bit of activity. And we have a lot of credit; most people here take out loans.”

It is this fabric of small trades that explains how important credit is for the group. But during the school term, money grows scarce: where the market once filled up, she now finds far less.

Other components of the project put a tangible asset directly into households: food kits, breeding goats, home garden plots. The VSLA takes a different path, giving the group the means to generate and circulate its own capital, a bet on longer-term self-reliance. It is a choice that, for a long time, left Chrismène feeling forgotten.

“What I could say to ASB is thank you for what you’ve brought us, we’re glad, because we always used to say we were “outside children”… The reason we said that is that where I sit, I would hear the women saying: “Oh, ASB came through such-and-such group, a lot of people say ASB gave them this and that,” and as for us, we never received anything, it felt like we were left out, like outside children.”

She immediately qualifies her own statement.

“Even today, the fact that you’ve come to do this interview with us, to come and see us: we don’t consider ourselves outside children, we consider ourselves rightful children.”

 

A bond that must outlast the project

She also has a message for ASB: that even if the program were to end one day, they should not be forgotten, the way other groups are remembered.

But she is categorical: what the group has built does not depend on how long the project lasts.

“…we say to ourselves: even if the program were to end one day, even if the program came to an end, we will not destroy it. We will keep going, because it helps us.”

Through Chrismène Laureus Jusné’s story, this intervention shows how a community savings group, at first met with impatience and mistrust, became a tool for economic self-reliance capable of sustaining itself well beyond the life of the project and through difficult times. Her testimony also reminds us that recognition of support matters to beneficiaries as much as the material help itself.