GEEP: Human banks for Africa's poor

My name is Uzoma Nwagba. I am the COO of GEEP. GEEP is Africa’s largest microcredit infrastructure which has democratised access to life-saving micro-capital ($23 - $230) for 2.4 million poor and vulnerable people in Africa. We target 25 million over the next 5 years. I design and manage this operation which combines mobile and facial technologies, an expansive 17,000+ network of human banks, and localised financing, to break perennial cycles of poverty in poor communities. My previous career was in finance (Analyst, Goldman Sachs, New York) and technology (Product Manager, Microsoft, Seattle). However, I could no longer bear watching the growing spate of poverty in my home country, Nigeria, where I grew up until college. After an MBA at the Harvard Business School, I packed my bags and relocated home, leaving all promising career and financial prospects in the US. This changed my life completely.

GEEP is founded on the principle that humanity is ONE interconnected bloc. None of us is truly free, until all of us are. Economic freedom comes from the dignity and opportunity to earn a decent living. This eludes 200 million adult Africans today, over 100 million being Nigerians. Our project is a lifelong commitment to attack economic exclusion head-on. We developed a process innovation, leveraging hand-held mobile technology and over 17,000 “human banks” taking financial access directly to the poor. We are doing this at large scale, in the poverty capital of the world. All our 7 million candidates and 2.4 million beneficiaries today are economically active (petty traders, artisans, smallholder farmers). In a study commissioned in 2015 by McKinsey to support us, 85% of these enterprises cited “access to finance” as their biggest challenge. They are not interesting to traditional lenders, due to perverse incentives.

Global poverty today is 750,664,150 people. Better said: their households barely afford a meal a day. Nigeria is the “poverty capital of the world” (13.6% of global poverty), the highest by far for a single country. 102,125,917 Nigerians, 48% of its population, live in extreme poverty. This is an indictment on our collective humanity; it translates direct erosion of our human potential. 

56 million of Nigeria’s active poor are capable of commercial activity to better their lives. This demographic lacks funding or formal identification that make it easier to access traditional financial services. They are also mostly unbanked. Their “economic value” never competes with formal trades, and the cost to aggregate them is prohibitive without innovation. This creates a perverse incentive where traditional lenders (e.g. banks and microfinance) disregard the 56 million microenterprises – leaving them in a poverty trap. Only 0.4% of formal loans in the past 3 years have gone to this demographic which also lacks formal transaction records or a verifiable credit histories. The hardest-hit segment are women. It is a brewing crisis. With 2.4 million lifted by GEEP so far and counting, our work has demonstrated the capacity to reverse this tide exponentially.

GEEP is essentially a micro-banking system for millions of poor people, taking financial inclusion, credit and financial literacy to poor communities, starting in Nigeria. We have built the capacity to serve over 10 million commercially-able people today with last-mile interest-free credit. We upturned traditional financial services (i.e. identity, physical infrastructure, bank branches), radically deconstructing it to 17,244 roving agents (“human banks”) trained and equipped with proprietary mobile technologies. We then scaled up this operation nationwide to serve millions of the commercially-able poor, 60% of whom are women. It is a direct attack on poverty through economic empowerment. The human bank comes to you and provides you with credit, financial literacy, ease of commerce, a better life.

GEEP is a process innovation in response to a brewing crisis. A defining feature of the project is its scale of impact and its even bigger potential. As a process innovation, we use big data and technology (including facial recognition) to break the barrier to identification, analysis, and access to capital for underserved people. These microenterprises are also geotagged to their physical trading spaces. Today we have over 7 million candidates profiled and are on a mission to 25 million by 2025.

GEEP first targets the demography of 56 million Nigerians who are poor, traditionally left behind, but are confirmed as commercially able. Some even have an active micro-trade. In parallel, the programme plans to scale up to target the same demographic in the rest of the African continent (we have received interest in our work from the nations of Ghana and Rwanda).

To understand the needs of this demographic, we conducted an extensive field study (with support from the Gates Foundation), engaging and polling poor communities directly. A total of over 50,000 were polled via randomised sampling. 85% of these individuals and households reported “access to finance for their business” in their top three challenges. Essentially, if they had this access – they would be able to take better control of their lives. Poverty is not a handicap, and it can be reversed.

With over 2.4 million direct beneficiaries of our project now, we are still quite aggressive about continuous improvement. Our human banks not only serve them daily with our interest-free credit product, but also provide constant FINANCIAL LITERACY training. They learn basic savings habits, book-keeping, pooled inventory, and micro insurance to better their lives and protect their livelihoods.

Economic participation (i.e. the ability to work and earn a respectable living) is one of the highest ways to dignify a human. Our project is obsessed with doing this at scale, building a global consciousness that poverty is primarily a problem of opportunity gaps. We are on an aggressive journey to elevate the forgotten poor, not by unsustainable handouts, but by economic participation that breaks cycles of poverty for the rest of their lives.

Beyond 7 million candidates and 2.4 million beneficiaries today, we also employ and equip 17,000+ university graduates serving human banks, living and working in these communities.

The project started in 2015 when one of my mentors, who advised the Vice President of Nigeria, told me the VP had a challenge credibly getting financing in the hands of the poor, many of whom were practically unknown. He also introduced me to an Executive Director, Mrs. Toyin Adeniji, who was to oversee the government fund. I raised my hand and offered to figure out the “how,” to do this in a credible and transparent manner. I was familiar with the poor; they were barely documented, but they had mobile phones. I reached out to my professional networks to fine-tune my ideas. In a matter of days, I was in the nation’s capital - selling the idea of human banks and a nationwide microcredit infrastructure. Essentially, the government was our first provider of funds, and we have grown and diversified from then.

I grew up in my village, Osusu-Aba, Abia State, Nigeria. My journey from an environment with rife poverty, to becoming a Harvard MBA, etc, is a series of micro opportunities offered to me by people who saw my potential, some of whom I never met in person. I will never forget Mrs. Nwankpa, the bursar of my elementary school, who provided a credit of ₦1470.00 ($3.79 in today’s dollars) to my father in 1995 to keep me in school that year, for example. I have experienced the power of little opportunities, compounded over time, to radically transform a person’s life. I made it a life mission to pay this forward to millions of people in such communities across Africa. 

What disturbs me the most about poverty is the gross indignity of it. Poverty is the singular biggest suppressor of our collective potential as a humanity. It is also a social/security issue because, one day, the world’s poor may have nothing else to eat but the rich. I believe focused economic empowerment can reverse this trend, and - with the advent of modern technologies - there has never been a better time to do this than now.

• Delivering this project has required a detailed understanding of the economics of the poor, and design of financial products that target them effectively. 
• Delivering the project efficiently and at SCALE has required a deep understanding of applied technology (especially mobile), big data, and human infrastructure. 
• Delivering this project sustainably has required building a formidable team of professionals who are not only deeply passionate but equally competent. My background, experiences and skills fall directly on these lines and have enabled us to achieve successes so far.

I started my career in financial services (Goldman Sachs). Here, I also got exposed to the 10,000 women non-profit project, seeking to understand fundamental economics of the poor. I have read voraciously the works of several luminaries in this space, including Nobel Prize winners Abhijit Banerjee and Ester Duflo, including their riveting recent work (“Poor Economics”), as well as Muhammad Yunus, one of the pioneers of classic microfinance on which we have innovated and enhanced.

I also served as a Product Manager at Microsoft, designing and building an adapted localised mobile phone for emerging markets. Our first release was in rural China, and we moved across multiple continents including Africa.

However, what has been most equipping is the quality of the team that has joined us on this journey. There are mostly locally-grown professionals who have staked their careers in sacrifice that we can build something much bigger than ourselves, and have an impact that would be truly transformative to our country and continent.

Our agents ("human banks") live and work in the most remote terrains, in order to access truly vulnerable populations; they sometimes relocate from cities for these jobs. These terrains are sometimes violent - as low income communities devole into. In 2016, two of our human banks in North-East Nigeria were kidnapped by bandits, in a community ravaged by the the Boko Haram terrorist sect. Their "offence" was the propagation of commercialisation (supposedly a "Western" ideal) and seeking to elevate people out of poverty which had been used as a weapon of subjugation. It was a crisis for our nascent project. The thought of losing staff whose who work was already sacrificial was paralysing.

First, I made it a point to reassure the team that the issue would be resolved, and to overcommunicate. It was important to me that they know that GEEP would stop at nothing to protect its people. We reached out to highest levels of law enforcement, tried not to get into a negotiation, while still stringing the bandits along in phone to enable their locations be tracked via cell towers. I am glad to say the bandits were caught, and our human banks released with minor injuries.

Nothing prepared the world for the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Nothing could have prepared me for it either: the nagging confusion and uncertainty; the constant wonder of what this means for our loved ones; the question of where we go from here; the spate of governments throwing their hands in the air with an implied message of "good luck." It overwhelmed us all.

However, I realise that a crisis is a time when servant leaders come alive. I had the conviction to step out of the apprehenshion to think about how to make this difficult time more bearable for people less privileged than I am. I therefore embarked on a Zoom campaign to my professional networks, home and abroad, mobilising resources to provide COVID-19 palliative support for 2,500 people in my hometown, Aba, Nigeria. Raising a total of $38,456.00 in one week, we set up distribution and education drives for food, sanitisers, educational materials and stay-at-home kits to protect people's lives.

Aba today, while being a sizeable town, has one the lowest occcurences of COVID-19 in Nigeria. For me, this was a simple act: no publicity, no board rooms, no accolades. But one whose impact is deeply profound to me.

GEEP is domiciled in the Bank of Industry (BOI), the oldest development finance institution in Nigeria. The bank provides us with a regulatory license cover, while also housing and insuring the pool of funds received from providers of capital we make available to the poor through our project. GEEP is however operated as an independent project within BOI, and I have had the privilege of autonomy to build the team, design and continue to innovate on the operation.

Our project is a detailed process innovation, leveraging modern technology to solve local problems. It addresses the decades-long challenges of a traditional industry (microfinance) and exponentially scale up its impact. Before GEEP, the pace of growth of poverty had drastically overwhelmed the traditional methods of finance and capital (936 microfinance bank branches, in a country of 56 million economically-active poor people). Traditional ways of thinking about this problem (network of branches, physical infrastructure, community cooperatives) were too expensive to scale up to serve this demography. GEEP turned the problem on its head, broke down its component parts, and innovated the industry into 17,244 “human banks” with mobile devices. Today we have profiled 7 million people for loans and have the capacity to deliver this to 30 million people, our major constraint being capital - as opposed to structure or process.

We have also innovated on an age-old problem of identity, the first step to build any economic history or financial asset. Most poor people are illiterate and officially unidentified (except for a voter’s card in some cases). It was therefore near impossible to organise them formally. We built localised technology allowing our “human banks” to first capture the data on each of the candidates, including facial recognition and biometrics to enable uniqueness and accuracy. The human banks also constantly update information on each candidate from their daily interactions; we leverage on this big data to analyse their credit-worthiness, advance subsequent (higher) credit, and advance financial literacy training.

Impact:

Our overarching goal is to eradicate poverty in the commercially able population of Africa's poor. According to the World Poverty Index, this is approximately 50% of Africa's adult poor, a total of ~200 million people. Our big audacious goal is to bring this number down to zero. (We are not addressing all poverty; however, we believe addressing poverty in commercially-able populations would automatically translate to reduced poverty in their infant or incapacitated dependents).

Outcomes:

The base outcomes that underpin this goal include:

a. Short-tem: Increased household consumption (which we target to see a minimum 50% increase, greater that $1.50 per human per day)

b. Mid/Long-term: Reduction in infant mortality (which is currently 8 times more likely in poor populations according to WHO statistics)

c. Mid/Long-term: Enrolment in basic education (as children are not deployed as street hawkers to generate basic supplementary income).

d. Mid/Long-term: Accumulation of savings

Outputs:

To achieve the outcomes outlined, we produce the following outputs:

a. Human banks, a disaggregation of traditional financial services, embodying it in trained roving agents equipped with technology tools that provide financial services - particularly credit - and financial education to the poor.

b. Effective microcredit products for the poor, taking into account their peculiarities, lifestyles, income patterns and domsetic pressures.

c. Financial literacy curriculum, delivered directly and consistently to each candidate profiled for the microcredit, as a prerequisite for eventual access to credit, and continuation even post funding.

Activities:

We are convinced, having run the following activities for the past 4 years, that they are directly responsible for our critical outputs:

a. Loan product research and design: extensive field studies, research, and quarterly revisions on our body of knowledge on the lives and methods of Africa's poor.

b. Innovation labs and technology deployment sessions, continually interrogating our technologies, systems and processes to align with our discoveries in loan product research and design.

Inputs:

a. Hard facts: data on current state of affairs and economic regression amongst vulnerable communities, the vast majority of the population.

b. Human capital

Our project currently serves 7 million people profiled (petty traders, petty artisans, smallholder farmers). 2.4 million of these people have received direct disbursement of microcredit, while the others are going through preparations for credit. These preparations include financial literacy, opening of mobile wallets (equivalent of bank accounts for the poor), and evaluation of their trades. In addition, there are 17,244 agents (“human banks”) who are university graduates employed by our project, and planted in the rural communities to serve the 7 million people. They are also direct beneficiaries via employment, technology training and capacity building.

In one year, our goal is to scale up to 10 million people profiled, with 5 million served with credit. We would also scale up the human banks proportionately (25,000)

In five years, our goal is to have reached the market of 25 million people, with 15 million served with credit, putting a 50% dent in poverty in our target population. Our target of humans banks - factoring in greater efficiency and economies of scale - would be 40,000.

Scale, Growth and Impact Goals

1 Year: In the next year, our goal is to scale up our operation to 10 million people captured, profiled, and in financial literacy for credit. Of this, we are on track to disbursed mircoloans to 2.6 million new candidates, bringing our total microenterprises to 5 million. We will reach more scale in the next one year than we have had in our 5-year history. Our goal is also to deliver at least 1 hour of monthly financial literacy training to each candidate.

5 Years: Over the next 5 years, it is our goal to scale up to 25 million people captured, profiled, and in financial literacy for credit. Of this, we seek to bring our total funded microenterprises to 15 million.

Geographical Expansion

1 Year: Our strategic plan for Q3 2021 is to expand our innovation to four new African markets. We are have received inbound engagement and requests for partnerships to deploy in Ghana, Rwanda and South Africa. These requests including private sector partners, donor agencies, and governments.

5 Years: We plan to be active with microcredit in 10 African countires - two per sub-region - by 2025. At this point, we will focus on depth versus breath, as there will be a critical mass of countries and sub-regions represented to enable us learn detailed nuances and tailor financial products that are appliable across the continent.

Capital

Our project works in partnership with funding partners (governments, commercial providers of capital). We build the capacity that attracts capital, and we deploy and return (or revolve) this capital using our infrastructure of human banks and proprietary tools. We are constantly evolving our operation and capacity to ensure that it outpaces our current and anticipated funding. In other words, ever prepared. We recognise that our current impact is relatively high, but our goals are even more ambitious. The primary barrier to achieving our goals, especially in 5 years, would be volume of our capital.

Technical (e.g. technology for hyper-localisation in new countries)

We are constantly evolving our technology, staying abreast of the most efficient ways to manage, mine and analyse data for accurate credit decisions, managing our fast-growing operation of human banks, and embedding big data and machine learning to automate more of our processes. The next level of our advancement should include voice-based access in 2021, allowing our candidates to simple tasks (e.g. balance enquiries, loan requests) by simply talking to phone voice prompts in local languages of multiple countries. This requires Natural Language Processing, a technology we are keenly following and seeking to adopt.

Funding support from the Elevate Prize will enable us to achieve significant strides in this area, amongst others. The Elevate network would also expose us to a set of global resources that even further expand our thinking and impact.

Capital

Expansion of partnerships: We are in advanced stages of an engagement with the World Bank, seeking to leverage our infrastructure to scale up their reach to poor and vulnerable communities in Africa. This also has the potential to accelerate our international expansion plans as outlined.

Technical

Constant training, exposure and evolution for our team: we plan to invest significantly in upskilling our technological teams, as well as other key functions in the organisation, to perform at even higher level of exposure. The Elevate network would be an incredible resource to support the team, even if via my own access and learnings from my Elevate involvement.

1. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Operational Support
2. Bank of Industry, Nigeria: Fund and Regulatory Support
3. Busara Centre for Behavioural Science: Microcredit product/incentive design
4. Nigerian Inter-Bank Settlement System: Identity Support

Our business model is the supply of microcredit and financial literacy, specifically targeting poor African populations who are historically left behind and have never been able to access funding to become active commercial participants in society. It is livelihood and economic empowerment, and restoration of dignity.

We have built a large-scale infrastructure of human banks (roving well-trained agents) and technology tools, and we deploy these human banks into poor and vulnerable communities where we provide capital, financial inclusion, and at least 3 hours monthly of financial literacy training to commercially-able members of the communities. The vast majority of our current 7 million profiled candidates, and 2.4 million loan beneficiaries, have never been exposed to funding and were stuck in poverty traps. All of them now run some enterprise on account of our project and this has translated to direct livelihood improvements and escapes from poverty.

We raise capital from institutions (governments and private-sector capital) seeking to target these demographics for impact and commerce. We revolve or return the capital upon completion of loan and repayment cycles of each beneficiary. We are also quite obsessive about monitoring and evaluation, constantly using our human banks to capture data that enables tracking of weekly and monthly impact of the credit on the microenterprises and their households. 

Our project today has the capacity for 10 million active beneficiares, and we are seeking to scale up across the shores of Africa.

The path to sustainability is the revolution of capital to enable more scale to several millions of people. Our funds come from providers of capital (public and private) and donor funding to support continued innovation and enhancement of our operation.

[due to some public sector support involvement in our project, we are happy to provide this detail on request but constrained to share them publicly]

Our project is at a tipping point. We have proven the model, that it is indeed possible to attack Africa's poverty challenge at large scale and pull millions of people out of poverty. We have onboarded 7 million microenterprises in poor commnities, serving 2.4 million of them with life-saving credit that has transformed them from struggling poor to commercially active.

Growth

However, Africa's poverty challenge is more significant. We seek to radically accelerate our impact, targeting 25 million people over the next 5 years. It sounds incredible at first, but this was exactly how 2.4 million sounded when we were at 130,000 only 2 years ago. Our capacity for growth is exponential. We seek a global network of bold thinkers and doers, people tackling the world's toughest problems, and with whom we can cross-pollinate the best of science, finance and innovation.

Capacity Expansion

The Elevate Prize would offer us the much-needed funding to innovate further - especially with processing local languagues to enable poorer people access financial services by simple voice talks on phone. This would more effectively support our operation to multiple African countries in which partners have reached out to us. The prize would also give us the flexibility to develop new products for currently underserved groups.

Exposure

The Elevate Foundation has a remarkable capacity to give us exposure that attracts even more capital for loans, and other operational support even beyond the Elevate Prize. This is a life-long journey I would personally cherish.

NGOs

Governments

Private capital (banks)

Techologists/innovators