Commitment pooling
Commitment pooling is a practice in which a community turns its members' promises of goods and services into vouchers and places them in shared pools, so people can exchange what they are able to offer.
The basics
Grassroots Economics describes commitment pooling as "A protocol and practice for routing promises, settlement, and mutual support through shared pools." In its docs, "communities issue redeemable commitments as Community Asset Vouchers, place them in shared pools."
The Grassroots Economics glossary defines a voucher as "A promise denominated in an agreed upon Unit of Account". The voucher is issued and accepted in exchange for money or in kind.
Will Ruddick set out the idea in "Letters from the Field: Commitment Pooling, An Economic Protocol Inspired by Ancestral Wisdom". The paper appeared in the International Journal of Community Currency Research (volume 27, pages 54 to 79) on 30 June 2023. Its abstract describes "pooling of commitments, as a mechanism for curating and fairly exchanging resources" within communities. It links the protocol to traditional mutual service practices.
Grassroots Economics calls itself "a community of practitioners, stewards, engineers, educators, researchers". Its docs say the service formerly presented as Sarafu Network has moved to Cosmo-Local Credit (CLC).
How it applies to Logos
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Examples
- Binguni and Mbele, Kenya. A Grassroots Economics case study describes a rural region of 400 households facing chronic money scarcity. Binguni, a self-organised savings group, pooled commitments of seeds, water, cooking and labour. Mbele's women farmers joined later with erosion control and water management. One member committed 10kg of seeds worth 2,500 KES. The Binguni group capped issuance at 50,000 BIGIs and agreed a 2% monthly decay to encourage flow.
- Sarafu, Kenya. A paper in Scientific Data (2022) by Carolina E.S. Mattsson, Teodoro Criscione and William O. Ruddick describes Sarafu as a "digital complementary currency in Kenya". It began as local physical community currencies and moved to a feature-phone interface in 2017. One Sarafu is worth roughly one Kenyan shilling. From 25 January 2020 to 15 June 2021 the data covers about 55,000 users and transactions totalling around 300 million Sarafu. Savings and lending groups called chamas are central to the system.
- Sarafu Network on Celo. The Grassroots Economics website reports 26,367 users, 285,197 peer-to-peer exchanges, 188 active commitment pools and 745 active vouchers, for 5 July 2023 to 20 July 2025.
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See also
Takes on this idea
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Sources
- Grassroots Economics documentation, docs.grassecon.org
- Glossary, Grassroots Economics documentation
- Community, Grassroots Economics documentation
- Case Study: Commitment Pooling in Binguni and Mbele, Kenya, Grassroots Economics documentation, updated 30 September 2026
- William O. Ruddick, Letters from the Field: Commitment Pooling, An Economic Protocol Inspired by Ancestral Wisdom, International Journal of Community Currency Research, 30 June 2023
- Mattsson, Criscione and Ruddick, Sarafu Community Inclusion Currency 2020-2021, Scientific Data, December 2022
- Grassroots Economics, grassrootseconomics.org