Gates Foundation aims to facilitate banking to the poor
news.yahoo.com
news.yahoo.com
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.
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.