This report contains an midline analysis of CARE’s POWER/PROFIR (Promoting Opportunities for Women’s Economic Empowerment) project on the financial health of village savings and loans groups in Cote d’Ivoire and Rwanda. The project is a collaboration between CARE Canada, Access Africa, and MasterCard Foundation. POWER Africa /PROFIR is based on the VSLA approach as a means to provide access to valuable financial services and build a pathway towards formal financial inclusion for poor households in rural areas. The key measures of the effects of linkage that are assess in this study are (1) Standardized return on savings (ROS), (2) Standardized return on assets (ROA), (3) Savings per member, (4) bank balances, (5) bank account usage, and (6) Adoption of individual bank accounts. These indicators measure the outcomes of the project along key dimensions of POWER Africa/PROFIR’s objectives of building financial capacity for all clients and decreasing gender gaps in access to and control of financial skills, assets, and services. We also look at how group characteristics, like the proportion of women members, attendance, access to credit, and