Saving Goals of Ghanaian Cocoa Farmers: A Cluster Analysis

Saving promotion is gaining importance as a cost-efficient poverty alleviation strategy. To tackle a person’s external and internal barriers to saving, and to design policy interventions, we need to first understand the addressees of such policies and their saving goals. Up to now, it is not clear how saving objectives are shaped by individual characteristics of subjects in low-income and lower-middle-income countries. To address this research gap, we perform a cluster analysis based on primary data collected from a phone survey of 405 cocoa farmers in Ghana. By employing Ward’s method, we systematically segment respondents based on their saving goals. Our study contributes to the literature on economic decision-making among smallholder farmers by systematically categorising saving motives and linking these to key sociodemographic characteristics. More affluent respondents have a wider range of saving goals, whereas the poorest clusters do not save or only save for emergencies. Non-savers are typically female, less educated and older. Our findings help to cost-effectively target vulnerable groups and ultimately tackle their specific obstacles to saving.