Across Johannesburg's Zimbabwean community, informal savings clubs known as stokvels have quietly become the primary way households fund the expenses that matter most: a child's school fees, a family funeral back home, a wedding that would otherwise be unaffordable on a single income.

Members contribute a fixed amount monthly into a shared pool, with the full sum rotating to a different member each cycle — a system built entirely on trust between people who, in many cases, only know each other from a single church or hometown association.

Financial advisers note that stokvels fill a gap that formal banking doesn't: cross-border transfers for a funeral in rural Manicaland, for instance, are simple to arrange through a stokvel network but can take days through a bank.

"We built our own bank because the real one was never built with us in mind," said one stokvel organiser who has run a 40-member group for six years without a single default.