One in three Kenyans belongs to a savings group that predates the banking system.
Susu is a community savings system practiced across West Africa in which members of a group contribute a fixed amount of money at regular intervals, and the pooled sum is given to one member at a time in rotation. In Ghana's Twi language, susu means "little by little" or "to plan."1 The system reportedly originated among the Yoruba of Nigeria, and the Ga people of Ghana are believed to have brought the practice with them when they migrated from the region.2
In East Africa, the same structure is called a chama, from the Kiswahili word for "group." Chamas arose in Kenya in the late 1980s and 1990s from the spirit of harambee, meaning "all together."3 Originally composed almost exclusively of women, chamas expanded to include men as their financial sophistication grew. Kenya now has an estimated 300,000 chamas managing approximately 300 billion Kenyan shillings, roughly 3.4 billion dollars, in assets.4
The formal term for these arrangements is rotating savings and credit association, or ROSCA. They exist under different names across more than fifty countries, including tandas in Latin America, gye in South Korea, hui in Chinese communities, stokvels in South Africa, and tanomoshiko in Japan.5 Anthropologist Shirley Ardener produced the first academic description of the structure in 1964.
The system operates entirely on trust. Each member relies on the others to continue contributing after they have received their payout. More than half of the adult population in sub-Saharan Africa remains outside the formal banking system.6 The informal economy on the continent accounts for 85.8% of total employment. In that economy, susu and chama groups serve as the primary mechanism for pooling capital, funding businesses, and managing household cash flow.7