What Enables Financial Resilience: Insights from a Participatory Research and Design Process with VSLA Members in Nigeria

Using a participatory research and design process co-led with community researchers, we construct a ground-up, relational understanding of the enablers of financial resilience and explore the role that Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) play in strengthening those enablers. Leveraging data from qualitative interviews and focus groups, we inductively identify three interconnected categories of enablers: financial and economic enablers, social enablers, and the institutional environment. Through their positive impact on financial, economic, and social enablers, VSLAs help members build absorptive and adaptive resilience capacity but not transformative capacity, due to institutional environment constraints. Our findings highlight how resilience enablers relate to and interact with each other and emphasize the critical role of the institutional environment in enhancing financial resilience. They also underscore the potential benefits of increasing our understanding of the connections between resilience enablers and interventions to enhance the design and impact of interventions aimed at strengthening financial resilience.