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Jorge Bolivar, president of the Investment and Cooperation FoundationFoundation, presented the project 'Saving to learn' at the Navarra Center for International Development at Institute for Culture and Society (ICS). This is an alternative approach for the economic inclusion partner-economic inclusion at the base of the pyramid of society (the poorest).

"We want to use business concepts to develop a social project ," he explained. As he pointed out, the core topic of success lies in changing the mentality of cultures that have a vision only for the short term deadline. "From day one, we help people to save and manage savings."

This project offers a different perspective on microfinance, a field in which Jorge Bolivar worked for some time and left because of "the risk of over-indebtedness, the distortions of the microcredit world and the lack of self-sustainability". In the world of microfinance," he emphasized, "the people at the base of the pyramid are not counted on".

training internshiprepetitive and collective

"For the training to work at the bottom of the pyramid it needs to have three characteristics: it must be internship, repetitive and collective," he pointed out. This model is known as UNICAs (Uniones de credit y Ahorro).

It is a financial community organization made up of between 10 and 30 people with a relationship of mutual trust. It is based on three fundamental pillars: the financial Education internship , self-financing through savings and self-management.

Jorge Bolívar recalled that the mission statement of project 'Ahorrar para aprender' is to strengthen these organizations so that they can set higher and higher goals linked to business entrepreneurship. The goal for this year is to create 300 UNICAs: so far 53 have been launched.