This is a great initiatives and I am supporter of any kind of philanthropy but saving accounts is not the best way you can help those people. I have been to these places, not to say people do not have any money , they have nothing to eat. Saving account will not provide them with food unless you deposit the money and educate them on how to use it wisely. They have to be fed first and educated, then come saving.
Having actually worked in one of "these places" (in microcredit in Uganda and evaluated programs in Kenya) I can tell you that providing a safe place to bank is one of the best ways to help people. I suppose the first step is to define what you mean by "these places".
If you're talking about a war torn country or a country that is ruled under a radical ideological agenda (e.g. Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Iran or North Korea) and/or with high inflation, yes, I'd agree that savings probably aren't really going to be important to them.
For the vast majority of developing countries however, most are not starving on a day to day. However, they may make a lot more money one day but none the next - so it's this variance that creates risk and why financial services of all types (credit and savings) help to smooth out the risk. To get a sense of the risk, try imagining yourself living in a room without locks in a neighbourhood with a high level of crime - what would you do with any extra cash you had? Contrary to popular belief, the poor often have an immense capacity to save - in the microcredit I worked at, there were those who joined to borrow small amounts of just so that they could access the network and save.
You got a good point there, but education is integral part of the process as well. Some people do not know how to save and have no trust to any institutions. They need to get help to overcome that barrier
People respond to incentives - that is the the fundamental idea on which economics is based. The poor aren't as helpless/stupid as much of the developed world makes them out to be. This was one of my frustrations while working in the developing world. While I now work largely in China at least in China they don't assume that in order to help the poor that education comes first - they have first provided the conditions that businesses can meet the needs and employ the poor (one of the reasons China's growth exceeds much of the developing world and especially those who rely on "aid").
We claim that providing financial services will provide empowerment (which it does), and then we try to force them to conform with our view half a world away with how they should spend and save their money by structuring financial products according to our needs as opposed to theirs. They don't need an education to save - that the service exists and incentives to save exist are enough as they will quite quickly educate themselves in that regard. No level of "education" will disabuse someone (anyone let alone a poor person in the developing world) of the notion that their government isn't corrupt or that they can "trust" an institution. Trust is earned. What you will have, like in any society, is first the incentive/need, then the early adopters and then word of mouth and that's how institutions earn trust.
