VICOBA: Where financial inclusion meets leadership with women at the forefront

In the open plains of Meserani Ward, in northern Tanzania’s Arusha Region where the Maasai community has lived for generations, women are quietly reshaping long-standing traditions.

In Maasai communities, women have long faced limited recognition in public and economic life, but new forms of collective power are emerging. Small savings groups, known locally as Village Community Banks (VICOBA), are doing more than expanding incomes. They are reshaping who participates in decisions, who controls resources, and who leads.

For years, most women relied on small, irregular earnings that were difficult to grow and easy to lose, leaving little room to plan beyond daily survival.

In response, community-based savings groups started to gain popularity as practical pathways for women to pool resources, manage risk, and support one another’s ambitions. Building on these structures, the Women’s Leadership and Economic Rights at Local Levels (WLER) programme, supported by Finland, worked with local government authorities and civil society partners to strengthen an enhanced VICOBA model across six regions.

The approach connects financial inclusion with leadership development, rights awareness, advocacy on gender-based violence and collective action, transforming savings groups into community institutions where women can save, invest, organize, and lead.

To date, sixteen such groups have been established, laying foundations for longer-term social and economic change.

Eva Mrumbe knows this journey well. Born and raised in Meserani, she grew up in a patriarchal culture where women’s rights were rarely acknowledged.

“It was a little challenging, but we didn’t really consider it to be wrong then, it was just the norm,” she recalls.

Over time, those norms have slowly begun to shift, and after having her third child, Mrumbe realized that with rising household expenses, she needed to earn an income. It was then that her entrepreneurial journey began, and she started selling green vegetables at the local market.

In 2023, a Community Development Officer invited her to a training session organized by UN Women and the Tusonge Community Development Organization (TCDO). There, she was introduced to an enhanced VICOBA model, designed by TCDO under the WLER project to support women to save and access loans, as well as to build awareness on rights, women’s leadership and gender-based violence - while supporting their long-term growth.