Saving as a foundation for development: lessons from Econet Group founder Strive Masiyiwa’s mother

In a recent conversation with John Hope Bryant, Strive Masiyiwa, founder and executive chairman of Econet Group, spoke about the woman who shaped him most, his mother. Her habit of saving, and the habit shared by many African women who trade in the markets, offers a simple but powerful lesson for social work and development practice across the continent.

A culture built on saving, not spending

Masiyiwa described how his mother, like countless African market women, understood the value of saving well before she understood any formal economic theory. These women set money aside rather than spend it on what is available now. They are not driven by instant gratification. Their eyes are on future use, on school fees, on a home, on the next generation.

This was the environment Masiyiwa grew up in. It was not a lesson taught in a classroom, it was a daily practice observed and absorbed. The discipline of saving became part of how his family made decisions, and it became part of who he is.

From family saving to a continental impact

That same discipline of saving is what allowed Masiyiwa’s parents to send him to school and support his training as an engineer. A household habit of setting money aside became the foundation for an education that shaped connectivity, mobile technology and enterprise across Africa and beyond.

Reading this through a social development lens

Mtandao’s social development perspective is concerned with the structural level, with social policies, social structures and social institutions, rather than only the individual. It asks how families gain access to the resources they need to meet basic needs while keeping their dignity intact.

Saving by African market women is a form of local resource mobilisation, one of the roles that developmental social work identifies as central to addressing poverty and underdevelopment. Rather than depending on aid or external relief, these women build capacity from within the family and community, using their own productive activity to secure a better future for their children.

Masiyiwa’s story shows how this kind of grassroots economic discipline can scale. A family strategy for saving became the basis for an education, which in turn produced an entrepreneur whose work has had a wide reach across the continent. Social development thinking would call this the connection between micro level practice, the family and community, and macro level outcomes, the policies, institutions and economies that shape a whole society.

The value of recognising African economic wisdom

The saving culture Masiyiwa describes did not come from a textbook or a foreign model. It came from lived experience, passed down by women whose economic wisdom is rarely written into formal theory. Recognising and naming this wisdom, as Mtandao’s work on African theories does, offers practitioners a grounded, locally rooted starting point for thinking about savings, self-reliance and family economic resilience.