M-Shwari in Kenya: Use and Impact Among the Jua Kali Informal Sector (Video)

In this project, researchers, Ndunge Kiiti, Jane Mutinda and Monique Hennink with cinematographer Steve McCord investigated how M-Shwari, a Safaricom savings and loan product, was being used by the relatively understudied Jua Kali informal sector in Kenya. Jua Kali, Swahili for ‘hot sun’ refers to small-to-medium-sized self-employed workers in the informal sector including masons, plumbers and other artisans. Curiously, shwari in Swahili means cool or calm. The project involved the production of a short video that provides an insightful and intricate snapshot into the advantages and challenges of using M-Shwari for this growing sector of the Kenyan economy. The video shows that while access to credit and savings is certainly valuable for this sector, there have been several challenges in interfacing with and understanding how to use the platform, partly because the product has not been advertised in this sector, particularly in rural areas.  

Watch the video to learn more and read reflections from the filmmaker Steve McCord below!

The Art of Disseminating Data by Steve McCord, McCord Media Group

Why Video?

One reason I was brought onto this project was to tangibly communicate research to practitioners while connecting results to individuals outside academia. Speaking as someone outside of this sphere, video makes complex social and technological ideas approachable. It is a way to reconnect the humanity of research that often becomes numbers and stats to actual human beings. Video is not a disenfranchised statistic; it is people expressing an experience. 

Video is not meant to comprehensively detail each element of research but to provide a tool to contextually discuss problems and solutions.  To create this context, I filmed on-location in Kenya for three weeks. Besides technical challenges like recording interviews in the middle of a noisy metallurgy sector of the Jua Kali, we also fought against the mentality that we will take a potential interviewee’s image and sell it. We had to consistently work to communicate the purpose and platform for this video and establish respectful and research-conscious video practices. For me, this was an excellent reminder that using a camera gives me tremendous power not to be confused with a right to film.

On a personal note, my favorite part of producing these videos is seeing a (Western) audience confronted with a reality that disagrees with their paradigm of the ‘developing world.’ Watching this video provokes an auditory, visual, and intellectual experience that cannot be ignored. Presenting a complex reality instead of a sensational snapshot is rare in media today making video like this is all the more necessary.

To hear more, tune in live this week to the IMTFI 2016 conference April 20-21 where the seventh-year cohort of funded fellows will be presenting preliminary findings from their research and Ndunge Kiiti will be the keynote speaker!

*Watch the Video

*Read the initial blogpost about the research process

Going to where the Women are: Insights from the Making Finance Work for Women Summit in Berlin, Germany

By Ursula Dalinghaus, IMTFI Postdoctoral Scholar

BMZ Berlin, Germany (Photo Ursula Dalinghaus)

On November 11th and 12th I attended the Making Finance Work Summit in Berlin, Germany, co-hosted by Women’s World Banking and the BMZ (Federal Ministry for Economic Development and Cooperation). At a time when Germany is responding to its own financial inclusion challenges with regard to integrating refugees from war-torn Syria, the agenda of closing the gap in formal financial inclusion globally could not be timelier.  

In his welcoming remarks, Thomas Silberhorn, Secretary for the Federal Ministry for Economic Development and Cooperation, began with an oft-cited quote in Germany by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “Money is coined freedom,” noting that "access to this freedom, access to money is key” for addressing the summit topic of making finance work for women where global access to financial services is uneven and unequal between men and women.

Speakers across the panels emphasized the importance of getting to know women’s priorities as entrepreneurs and for their households. Research cited showed that women made 70% of household decisions and invested 90% of their income in the household. And yet as some speakers pointed out, the reason for the summit was the paradoxical statistical finding that women still remain largely underrepresented in, and excluded from, formal financial channels and services, from the boardrooms and decision-making entities of financial service providers, and from impact investments.

The story of women entrepreneurs who conduct business literally at the doorsteps of banks and yet do not have bank accounts was picked up by many at the summit as a powerful metaphor for showing the gap in formal financial inclusion as one not only of access but acknowledgement of a whole constellation of women’s concerns around access, empowerment, and autonomy.


"A BETA Way To Save Pilot"

A BETA Way To Save (Photo Women's World Banking) 

Several panelists also emphasized a need for financial products and services that target and reflect women’s priorities and needs, especially for saving and greater autonomy over household income. Diamond Bank and Women's World Banking's pilot study, “A BETA Way to Save,” stood out as a successful case of a commercial bank adapting to this market segment and their existing practices. Low-income self-employed women vendors in the Balogun market in Nigeria continued to rely on informal financial services for savings and short-term loans. But the problem was not only one of access; women experienced emotional distance too. The BETA Savings product moved the bank closer, physically and emotionally, to where women already are. By bringing the doorstop of the bank to the women, with regular visits by BETA agents to the market stalls, women vendors no longer faced the logistical problem of leaving the market stall to deposit savings in the bank and the time-consuming security measures this required.

In the session, How Can Technology Drive Financial Inclusion for Women, Anna Gincherman (Women's World Banking) explained how the BETA Savings pilot “developed a product that mimicked the informal sector.” BETA “replicated” the informal susu system found in Nigeria and West Africa. Adapting the informal financial practices of savings deposit schemes known as “susu,” or here “ajo" (“daily contribution scheme”), she noted that we can learn from the informal sector “in creating a better proposition by employing a sales force of ‘BETA friends’ collectors that go around every day opening accounts using mobile technologies, so it's solving that issue of mobility.” BETA (or “good”) saving accounts integrated the face-to-face interactions of agents (BETA Friends) with the opening and maintenance of accounts using mobile technologies and other financial tools.

Photo Diamond Bank

Accounts were easy to open and maintain, enabling interpersonal deposit and withdrawal transactions in addition to traditional and mobile-based channels (such as ATMs and mobile transfers). Women could check and observe how their accounts were updated in real time, building trust in the system. Women earned interest on their deposits and could enter lotteries for cash prizes and other rewards by keeping money in the system. The bank created its own platform rather than partnering with MNOs to create a multichannel hub that could provide a seamless user experience. Marketing of the project used simple everyday language rather than “bank” language and BETA agents had a variety of means available to educate clients about the product and technical use, supplemented by financial education, “BETA Talks.” BETA Friends agents were the key success factor. The technical aspects worked because human agents could explain, connect, and build trust with clients, supplementing technology with face-to-face interaction. From the provider perspective, the scale and incentives for local agents who interact with clients was an important part of the design, one that is hoped can be scaled up.

Key Takeaways
I was impressed with how the ‘BETA’ case study resonates with the findings of many IMTFI projects affirming how social relationships and new technologies work together. Eric Osei-Assibey’s related research in Ghana on Susu collectors and mobile money also showed the importance of face-to-face interaction as the basis for trust in savings and repayment strategies that could not be captured by the phone. Mobile phones and other new financial technologies reflect and remake women’s social relationships. New forms of inclusion empower women, such as making the household budget a subject of intra-household dialogue between men and women. Greater inclusion may also create new hierarchies and tensions in the household that women must negotiate anew. The importance of “the human factor” for how low income earners are adopting new technologies requires ongoing research as new products and services are designed.*

Another key takeaway for me from this panel on digital inclusion, then, is that programs like the BETA pilot which take into account these local practices may only be sustainable in the long term if they can be scaled up, and only if they can provide an affordable and reliable service for users while also making money for the bank. On the same panel, Liz Kellison (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) underscored that "the solution to inclusion is digital. Without it, it will not be possible to reach the necessary scale." Developing products with women’s needs in mind means they can be “accelerators” but this depends on "making sure we have the rails in place to offer digital financial services -- the rails, the rules, the regulations. As soon as we do that then we have to think about the players that could be using this ecosystem.” Kellison noted that conditional cash transfer and support programs like those in South Africa and India show how digital payments can scale up to connect governments and citizens.

This goes hand-in-hand with the rollout of identity and biometric programs that can ensure women’s ability to open and access their own accounts. Louise Holden (Master Card) reminded listeners at the summit of the startling statistic that women are not only financially but also legally excluded, with even more women without the legal identity (or in some cases eligibility to secure one) necessary for transactional banking. “Legal identity and digital identity are fundamentally linked. It’s fundamental.” Holden views Fintech as a solution and described the South African case where multiple welfare programs could be linked through technology available on and offline and provide “proof of life” identity checks necessary for pension payouts, as one example.

Worn-down fingerprints of Rickshaw pullers in Delhi 

illegible to biometric scanners (Photo Mani Nandhi/Liz Losh)

The importance of IDs for accessing formal financial services is crucial and one that IMTFI researchers have also been documenting. But like digital inclusion, the challenge is not only one of access. In India, where a national biometric ID program  (AADHAAR) continues to be rolled out, programs seeking to formally include every citizen must take into account how biometric cards pose important questions about “stable identities” or how some forms of labor erase the physical signs by which unique identities are verified.

Greater digital financial inclusion also raises new questions about data protection as a public good. In the Q&A one participant asked how end users might monitor how their data is used. Louise Holden noted that data integrity is reputation; “data allows the network to be secured.” Tom Delucca (AMP Credit Technologies) added that paradoxically, the greater a “data subject’s ability to pick and choose what data is used, the less reliable for us who wish to use it for purposes which are beneficial to you as the data subject.” Paying attention to women clients’ needs and preferences, as well as to the gendered and social relations of which financial technologies are a part, is important to answering these questions, improving design and adoption, but also observing how women are negotiating these new credit and data relations.

The importance of collaboration, partnerships, and shared incentives between commercial providers, states, and regulators was an important theme throughout the summit. Low-income women, the target segment for these entities, should be seen as a partner. In an earlier panel on targeting women as a new growth segment, Debra Mallowah (Unilever Africa) picked up the thread about “who owns the customer?” saying, “Don’t tell her you own her. You need to get in a relationship. Create the love. Understand her influence and power.”

The Making Finance Work for Women Summit generated a productive forum for fostering dialogue around client-centric design and how it is working on the ground, from different provider perspectives. I was encouraged by how the partnerships showcased across the panels, as well as the careful research being done on the ground by product developers, service providers, and analysts from a variety of institutions, are placing target communities front and center. Going to where the women are means empowering while taking seriously locally specific needs and practices in the collaborative endeavor to close the financial inclusion gap.

References

*p. 11, Osei-Assibey, Eric (2014) What Drives Behavioral Intention of Mobile Money Adoption? The Case of Ancient Susu Saving Operations in Ghana. IMTFI Working Paper

For Women’s World Banking blog posts on the summit panels, see the Women's World Banking Blog and to view panel videos from the summit, see Quick Cuts from the Making Finance Work for Women Summit 2015 

Innovative and Interactive Ways to Improve the Savings Habits of Women

by IMTFI Researchers Deepti KC and Mudita Tiwari 

Sarala is a micro-entrepreneur with a bank account and access to banking services within 1 kilometer of her residence Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum in Mumbai. Yet, Sarala uses higher-risk and unregulated savings options such as chit-funds - a type of group savings mechanism where payouts are made using a lottery system. With Sarala’s husband often spending household savings on gambling or addictive substances, she continually strives for strategies to hide cash in food jars, piles of clothes, and among beauty supplies. Despite having bank accounts, she does not want to save with the bank. “I am not able to save enough to go to bank and deposit”, states Sarala.

A woman showing where she hides her money in the kitchen 

Sarala was not alone in thinking so. In the First Phase of the study, we followed the lives of 25 women in Dharavi for two months to study women’s saving behavior. It is to be noted that many women were not open to admitting their hiding strategies unless we visited them multiple times and gained their trust. Hence, we used an ethnographic research approach to learn about their lives in their local context. Women taught us about their savings needs. We were convinced that they needed i) financial counseling to address the psychological barriers they face about savings, and ii) savings products that are flexible, offer liquidity and promote daily savings. 

Design of the financial education modules and a savings tool
The lessons we learned in the First Phase of the study inspired us to design financial education modules using an interactive comic book format depicting the life of the women entrepreneurs. The characters were carefully crafted using life stories from women’s lives - challenges that women micro-entrepreneurs like Sarala face and how they overcome these financial challenges. The comic books introduce concepts of disciplined savings, and how to achieve short-term and long-term savings goals. 

An image from the comic book

While we believed that our financial education modules would encourage women to maximize their savings, at the same time, we also learned from our previous study that financial education is not enough if financial consumers do not have access to flexible saving products. 1  

Lately, economists and researchers have experimented with savings tools beyond basic banking access. The first study of this type introduced a lockbox to respondents in a randomized controlled trial in Kenya. 2 The findings show that supplying a secure lockbox to store money increased savings by 66 percent. They also found a positive impact for women with “below median decision-making power in the baseline.” The product led to a higher “self-perception” among the participants of their savings behavior and positively affected consumption decisions on durable goods. 

With an eye to the innovative project conducted in Kenya, we decided to provide alternative savings tools to our respondents, along with financial education, to understand if the savings products could improve their savings capability.

Experiment to understand the impact of the financial products 
In the Second Phase of the study, we conducted an experiment in Bihar with 203 women who were associated with Self Help Groups (SHGs). We provided 40 women with financial education training; 40 women with a lockbox and a key; 43 women with a lockbox and a key as well as financial education; and 80 women received no intervention. 

A female respondent and her family and neighbors listen to the story on savings 

We followed women for more than two months and recorded their savings at the end of first and second months. Women who received the financial education training increased their savings by 8% compared to women with a 1% increase in savings who did not receive financial education. Provision of the lockbox further significantly increased savings by 42-51% during the intervention. 

Data indicates that women who received financial education training shared their knowledge with others too. 77% of women who received training reported sharing their knowledge with others; 73% reported discussing the household’s expenses, budget and savings with their husband; and 59% reported they encouraged their children to save.  

A woman receiving a lockbox and a key

Increase in SHG bi-weekly saving
Women were meeting with their SHGs on a weekly basis, and in every meeting the majority (87 percent) was depositing Rs. 10, a minimum required amount to be a member of a group. The average bi-weekly savings amount during the baseline survey was Rs. 20. 
After we provided women with the intervention, SHG bi-weekly saving increased to Rs. 22 after a month; and to Rs. 32 after two months. There was a substantial increase in savings in women in the treatment group - who received a lock box and financial education training, compared to women in the control group - who received no financial literacy and lockbox from us. For example, bi-weekly savings of women in the control group increased from Rs. 26 to Rs. 31 - a 16% increased in saving, whereas women in the treatment group increased savings from Rs. 20 to Rs. 33, a 39% increase in bi-weekly SHG savings.  

Lessons learned
Our results align with other similar academic studies, like the Kenyan study noted above. We learned that understanding the financial behavior of women is a very crucial and progressive step towards finding solutions to empower women in the marketplace. Women like Sarala need savings products that are flexible, offer liquidity and promote daily savings. Women cannot go to banks every day, especially if they are living in rural areas that are far away from these services. The weekly engagement with SHGs is a step forward but still amounts to sporadic savings. In most cases, they are saving the minimum ‘required’ amount to remain a member. 

When promoting savings, the psychological barriers women face when trying to save must be addressed. Our findings indicate that context specific financial education, and reinforcing saving behavior through easy-to-use tools such as the lockbox, encourages women to save regularly. For example, in our study, women were actively hiding money away in their homes to ensure other household members don’t squander away savings. Providing a secure lockbox helped women put away money safely. Providing relevant financial education helped women save this money in banks and SHGs rather than at home or through chit-funds. 

Findings from this study can encourage NGOs and public policy makers to find very simple tools to implement that can help women increase their savings by a significant amount. This kind of an intervention is not only low cost, but also low maintenance and is the kind of short-term solution that is adaptable to the lifestyles and habits of poor women in India.

References:
1. KC, Deepti and MuditaTiwari. 2015
“Can Financial Literacy Help Migrants Save More?” Funded by Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI), University of California. Published by IFMR Lead.

2. Dupas, Pascaline, and Jonathan Robinson. 2013a. 
“Savings Constraints and Microenterprise Development: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Kenya.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 5 (1): 163-192.

Read Deepti KC and Mudita Tiwari's Project Report Innovative and Interactive Ways to Improve the Financial Capabilities and Savings of Women

Gender, Cash, and the Mobile in Papua New Guinea

We are happy to share our most recent working paper, written by Supriya Singh and Yaso Nadarajah: "School Fees, Beer and 'Meri': Gender, Cash, and the Mobile in the Morobe Province of Papua New Guinea". From the abstract:

We combine the perspectives of the anthropology and sociology of money with user-centred design to explore how the use of cash in rural and remote Papua New Guinea will shape the use of mobile money. Drawing on 13 open-ended interviews, group interviews involving 100 persons, and participant observation over two visits to Morobe province in 2010 and 2011, we found cash is used for school fees, mobile phones, household goods, transport, beer, cards, women and gifting to wantok, that is, people connected by descent or place. Cash is individually controlled and women’s savings are often hidden in pandanus walls or locked cupboards. Women control cash from gardens and the re-selling of betel nuts and cigarettes. Men take the larger share of cash from coffee and control the ‘big money’ from mining. Mobile money, if appropriately designed, can reinforce the privacy and security of cash and savings, facilitate gifting to wantok, and lead to greater financial inclusion of women.

Click here to read our working paper!