A susu or sou-sou or osusu or asue (also known as a merry-go-round, Partner, or Pawdna in Jamaica; sol in Haiti;, san in Dominican Republic, and Njangi in Cameroon) is a form of

rotating savings and credit association A rotating savings and credit association (ROSCA) is a group of individuals who agree to meet for a defined period in order to save and borrow together, a form of combined peer-to-peer banking and peer-to-peer lending. Members all chip in regula ...

, a type of informal savings club arrangement between a small group of people who take turns by ''throwing hand'' as the partners call it. The name is used in

Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent after Asia. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 20% of Earth's land area and 6% of its total surfac ...

(especially

West Africa West Africa, also known as Western Africa, is the westernmost region of Africa. The United Nations geoscheme for Africa#Western Africa, United Nations defines Western Africa as the 16 countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Gha ...

) and the

Caribbean The Caribbean ( , ; ; ; ) is a region in the middle of the Americas centered around the Caribbean Sea in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, mostly overlapping with the West Indies. Bordered by North America to the north, Central America ...

. Each person contributes periodically the same amount to a common fund; the total contributions are disbursed to a single member of the group. Each time, the recipient changes so that eventually all members are recipients. Participants of a susu do not make a profit. Instead, small periodic contributions are turned into a larger lump sum of the same value, with the susu acting as a savings club.

Overview

A member who receives a distribution early on effectively receives a loan. They collect a larger sum of money early and "repay" as they make contributions going forward. A member who receives a distribution toward the end of a rotation has effectively been "saving" their contributions leading up to the disbursal. Traditionally the arrangement is conducted in cash and without any interest charged. The organizer of the sou-sou may be compensated for their efforts as a courtesy. Since a sou-sou is not a written or legal contract it relies on personal trust to discourage malfeasance. For this reason it is more likely that the participants are members of the same community and know each other. The concept of a susu is used throughout the world and has over 200 different names that vary from country to country. The funds are generally gathered with a set amount contributed from family or friends each week. An estimated three quarters of Caribbean immigrants in New York participated in susus during the 1980s.

Susu scams

Blessing Loom and 8-Ball Pyramid Schemes

Scammers have set up

pyramid scheme A pyramid scheme is a business model which, rather than earning money (or providing Return on investment, returns on investments) by sale of legitimate product (business), products to an end consumer, mainly earns money by recruiting new members ...

s which imitate or pretend to be susus. In contrast to traditional susus (in which participants only receive the money they put in without profit), these schemes promise a profit. Additionally, these scheme promise rewards for recruiting more people to the susu, in effect making it a pyramid scheme. These fake susu scams (also known as "blessing looms" or "gifting circles") increased during the

2020 COVID pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

, and are often targeted to

African-Americans African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from any of the Black racial groups of Africa. ...

under the guise of being the traditional African and Caribbean practice.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Sou-sou: Black immigrants bring savings clubs StatesideSou-sou: Africa savings pool scheme in AmericaFTC article on differentiating real susus from scams
Rotating savings and credit association Microfinance in North America Microfinance in Africa Informal economy in North America Informal economy in Africa Economy of the Caribbean Financial services in Ghana Afro-Caribbean culture

Overview

Susu scams

See also

References

External links