How an adashe works, and how to run one without arguments
An adashe is a rotating savings group in Hausa-speaking communities: in northern Nigeria, among Hausa speakers in Niger, and in the Hausa-speaking zongo communities of Ghana. It is often spelled adashi, and both spellings are common. Members pay the same amount on an agreed day into one pot, and each time one member takes the whole pot. It keeps going until every member has had their turn.
In English, an adashe is a rotating savings club, which economists call a rotating savings and credit association (ROSCA). In Nigerian English people often just say a contribution.
Nobody earns interest and nobody pays any. A member who takes an early turn gets a lump sum up front and pays it back through their contributions; a member who takes a late turn has saved with the help of the group’s discipline. People use an adashe for rent, school fees, stock for a shop, a wedding, or to start or grow a small business.
How does an adashe work?
- An organizer brings together people who know each other well: traders in the same market, neighbours, relatives or co-workers.
- The group agrees the amount each person pays, how often (daily, weekly or monthly), and how many members there are. The number of members decides how many turns there will be.
- The group agrees the order of turns.
- On each payment day every member pays, in cash, by bank transfer or from a mobile wallet, and the organizer passes the whole pot to the member whose turn it is.
- When every member has had a turn, the adashe is complete. Many groups then start again with the same people.
Some members take two shares, paying twice the amount and getting two turns. Others share one turn between two people who each pay half. Whatever the group allows, it helps to write it down at the start.
How is the order of turns decided?
There is no single rule. Many groups ballot the order at the first meeting so that nobody can say it was fixed. Some give the first turn to a member with an urgent need, such as rent that is due or school fees. Others go by who joined first, or give an early turn to the organizer for the work of running the group.
Any of these can be fair if everyone agrees to it before the first payment. Problems start when the order was never written down, or when it seems to change to suit one person. Keep the order where every member can see it, and record any swap that two members agree to.
What should the group agree before it starts?
Most arguments in an adashe come from something nobody agreed at the start. Before the first payment, settle these and write them down:
- The amount and the day. How much each share pays, and on which day each payment is due.
- The order of turns, and how it was decided.
- Late payment. How many days a member has before they are counted as late, and what happens then.
- Swaps. Whether two members may swap turns, and who has to agree.
- Leaving. What happens if a member has to leave before the adashe is complete.
Share the rules with every member, so the organizer is not the only one who remembers them.
What goes wrong in an adashe?
- Someone runs off with the money. An organizer who holds the pot, or a member who takes an early turn and then stops paying, leaves the others with the loss. This is why people only join an adashe with people they trust.
- Late payments. One late member means the member whose turn it is receives less than they planned for, and the organizer has to chase people one by one.
- Arguments over who paid. A notebook or a long WhatsApp chat is hard to check months later, and every question turns into a question of trust.
- Arguments over the order. An order agreed by word of mouth is easy to remember differently.
- Lost records. When the only record is one notebook or one phone, losing it can mean losing the history of the whole group.
Be careful with anyone who offers to hold everyone’s money and promises a guaranteed payout or interest on top. A rotating adashe doesn’t need anyone to hold money between turns: the pot goes straight from the members to the member whose turn it is.
How do you run an adashe with Savings Circle?
- Create the group. Give it the name your members know, such as “Market traders’ adashe”, and choose a name type: Savings circle, or another word from the list. Set the currency to naira (₦), what each person pays per round and the schedule: daily, weekly or monthly.
- Add members from your contacts. They don’t install anything.
- Set the order of turns. Ballot the order at random in front of everyone, or enter the order you agreed. A random ballot saves its seed, so anyone can check later that it wasn’t changed. Members can ask to swap turns, and the swap is recorded too.
- Record payments as they come in: cash, bank transfer or a mobile wallet such as OPay or PalmPay, with a screenshot as proof if you like. It works offline, even with no data, and syncs when you’re back online.
- Remind the late ones. One tap opens WhatsApp, SMS or Telegram with a polite message in their language.
- Record each payout. Every entry is dated. A correction is added as a new entry, and the original stays in the history.
- Share the record. Send a member a receipt or a statement of what they have paid. On a computer, open the same groups in the web app.
Savings Circle never holds or moves money. Members pay each other the way they already do; the app is the shared record of who paid, who is next and what is owed.
Other names for the same idea
In Hausa it is adashe or adashi. In Yoruba it is ajo or esusu, and in Igbo it is isusu. In Sierra Leone and The Gambia it is osusu, and in Ghana it is a susu. Further afield the same system is a committee in Pakistan and India, a tanda in Mexico, a chama in Kenya, an arisan in Indonesia and a paluwagan in the Philippines. Economists call all of these rotating savings and credit associations, or ROSCAs. Savings Circle works for any of them.
What is adashe?
Adashe, also spelled adashi, is the Hausa word for a rotating savings group in northern Nigeria and Niger. In English it means a rotating savings club: each member pays the same amount on an agreed day, and each time one member takes the whole pot until everyone has had a turn.
Guides
- South Asia: committee, kameti, chit fund, bhishi, kitty party and samity
- Africa: susu, chama, ajo, adashe, equb, hagbad, stokvel, tontine, mukando and chilimba
- The Americas and the Caribbean: sou-sou, tanda, junta, lending circle and pardner
- Asia and the Pacific: arisan, paluwagan and hụi
- The Arab world: jam’iya