It is, of course, prohibited by law, yet various studies show that it’s often more difficult to get a loan if your origins are different to the country in which you were born or reside. In France, racist criteria based on a customer’s name or appearance are regularly applied alongside objective criteria relating to a person’s financial situation when they apply for a loan, as a 2016 report has already demonstrated. Ten years ago, when Fatoumata fell victim to this kind of discrimination by banks, she decided to set up a community-based alternative to a loan: a tontine.
© Victoria Stampfer — Sphera Network
PARIS, 23 JULY 2026
I always count the money in front of the others. That’s my rule. Ten thousand euros in notes, taken out in front of a webcam, with nineteen women watching via video call. When you can’t see the money, it undermines trust. So I always show it.
My name is Fatoumata, I’m 31, I’m a personal carer and I was born in Paris. I make a point of saying ‘born in Paris’ because, at one point, it mattered.
In 2015, my father fell ill in Senegal. I applied for a small loan from my bank in France – eight hundred euros – to pay for his treatment. But they told me: “Without a guarantee that you won’t stay in Senegal, I can’t grant you the loan.”
I was earning 1,500 euros a month, net, and I was living with my aunt, so I wasn’t paying any rent. I could therefore easily have repaid the loan. But they turned me down anyway. I was a victim of discrimination by the bank. Sadly, due to lack of medical care, my father died.
I’m not telling you this so you’ll feel sorry for me, I’m telling you because it made me realise something: I could either wait for the banks to change, or manage without them.
So I set up a tontine.
You may or may not be familiar with the term. Back home in Samécouta, in Senegal, everyone knows what it is. It’s simple, in our case for example, there were twenty of us women, all from the same village in Senegal. Every month, each of us put in 500 euros. That made a total of 10,000 euros. And every month, the whole sum went to one of us. Then we’d start again, until all twenty had had a turn. The cycle repeats every twenty months.
No bankers. No interest rates that go up just because you look like the wrong sort. No applications turned down.
Once a month, I’d choose a ‘debt collector’. She’d visit everyone in turn to collect the contributions and make sure no one was missing anything.
The first time I did it, I started with the northern suburbs of Paris. It took me a whole afternoon to visit everyone! And the next day, I did the south. When Aissata, who’s a therapist, took on the task, she made the rounds to see all eighteen members between her consultations.
We meet once a month. On the day of the meeting, before voting, we rank the different projects to be funded –from most to least urgent. This is because the funding is only allocated once per round, and it needs to be allocated at the right time to the right person. Each of us writes the first name of the person we’ve chosen on a slate. Once, it was Foulématou who won. She’s a dental assistant and a mother of three, and wanted the money to buy a car. She joked: “No more public transport with the children!”
There’s one thing I’m very particular about –I always ask if anyone has gone into debt to pay their share. If that’s the case, I give the money back. We’re not here to drag each other down.
Foulématou puts it better than I do:
“We’re mothers, students, employees and entrepreneurs. We’re here because, at some point, we were victims of discrimination by banks. The tontine is our lifeline.”
I’ve made it exclusively for women so that we are the sole decision-makers when it comes to our projects. Financial independence, for me, is essential. And anyway, we’re the ones who run the household!
I’m not trying to sell you a miracle. We haven’t found THE solution; we’ve simply found A solution. The tontine isn’t a bank. Ten thousand euros is all well and good, but you have to wait your turn –sometimes for many months– before it comes to you. And it doesn’t change the fact that the bank turned me down at the outset; it’s still there.
But with twenty of us, we can lift what we can’t lift on our own.
— FATOUMATA
This interview was taken by the team at our French partners, StreetPress.
Toolkit:
🛠️ Resources to help you take action:
🇫🇷 Cigales clubs are French community-based investment groups comprising between 5 and 20 people who save regularly in order to invest collectively in small and medium-sized enterprises, co-operatives and associations in their neighbourhood, town, county or region.
🇩🇪 The Chimgauer is a local currency devised by students to support small businesses in their region, Bavaria, in Germany.
Our picks
A documentary, an autobiography and a song to explore the topic further:
How do people survive when they are excluded from the formal economy? In 2015, in “Tiroirs-caisses, tontines et solidarité”, Gilbert Kelnert documented how the community of Grand-Yoff, a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Dakar in Senegal, organises itself to meet its needs. At the heart of this system are women and their tontines. It’s a creative, solidarity-based informal economy which, according to economist Serge Latouche, we should take inspiration from.
— Recommended by Hélène, journalist
Because of her appearance —“too muscular, too short, too dark-haired”— the surfing champion Johanne Defay lost her sponsor at the age of 18 and, with it, her main source of income. So, at the start of her career in a sport associated with ultra-rigid beauty standards that imprison women, she turned to her community for support. In 2015, she launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise 18,000 euros, which she reached in just four days. This support enabled her to continue competing and go on to win a bronze medal at the 2024 Olympic Games, as she recounts in her autobiography“À contre courant”.
— Recommended by Pauline, coordinator
“B-N-P hand over the change, hand over the notes.” In this very short track, called “BNP”, featuring Nabounou, an undocumented woman living in exile, the French band Odezenne makes an unambiguous observation: this world of finance, which is supposed to make us richer, creates and exacerbates inequalities.
— Recommended by Hélène, journalist
