Digital "Marketplace Literacy"

Madhu Viswanathan (B.Tech, Mechanical Engineering, IIT, Madras, 1985; Ph.D. (Marketing), University of Minnesota, 1990) is Professor of Marketing, College of Business Administration at Loyola Marymount University in 2019, and Professor Emeritus, Gies College of Business, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research programs are on measurement, and subsistence marketplaces, where he has authored several books including Measurement Error and Research Design (Sage, 2005), Enabling Consumer and Entrepreneurial Literacy in Subsistence Marketplaces (Springer, 2008), Subsistence Marketplaces (2013), and Bottom-Up Enterprise (2016).  He pioneered the area of subsistence marketplaces, a bottom-up approach to poverty and marketplaces (www.business.illinois.edu/subsistence).  He teaches courses on research methods, subsistence, and sustainability reaching thousands of students in-person and on-line.  He founded and directs the Marketplace Literacy Project (www.marketplaceliteracy.org), pioneering marketplace literacy education that has reached more than 100,000 women across four continents.  He has received numerous awards and served on the Livelihoods Advisory Board of UNHCR.

Women with low income can be effective customers and entrepreneurs by understanding the marketplace. Traditional programs focus on what individuals should know and how they should function. Marketplace literacy focuses on why; by enabling a deeper understanding of the entire marketplace and their own roles in it as customers or as entrepreneurs. women understand why to be an effective customer or entrepreneur, why to seek value in exchanges, why to choose a specific business and so on.

As a result, women become more effective customers, saving money and buying better-quality products. Women start or expand ongoing enterprises and run them more effectively. Women gain self-confidence and improve their own well-being.

We propose a digital platform that will enable design and demonstration of marketplace literacy, connecting partners and beneficiaries in a post-Covid world and enabling use of the education to reach millions of people.

A woman living in poverty in rural and urban settings around the world has many challenges to overcome in participating in the marketplace. She needs to overcome restrictions placed by her family and by societal norms. She needs to gain confidence in herself to be able to carry out her role as a customer or as an entrepreneur. She needs the skills and knowledge that will enable her to do so. And she needs to know her rights in the marketplace. To address these challenges, she needs marketplace literacy education and support in a variety of arenas.

Traditional approaches that aim to empower her focus on specific livelihood training and microfinancing or in providing access to value chains and other linkages to employment and entrepreneurship. However, to empower her means to address issues of her self-confidence and core identity at an emotional and motivational level, and her capacities at a cognitive level. It means fully understanding her life circumstances at a minute level and using this understanding to consider solutions.

The scale of this problem really extends to much of humanity that lives with low income, barely making ends meet, from extreme poverty to the edge of lower-middle income.

Developed through pioneering research taking a bottom-up orientation, marketplace literacy is unique in using the know-why or an understanding of marketplaces as a basis for the know-how of being an informed buyer or seller.  Despite the difficulties with abstract thinking that low-literate individuals may experience, our program enables a deeper understanding of marketplaces by leveraging the social skills that participants bring to the program and relating educational content back to their lived experiences.  The program is bottom-up, concretizing, localizing, and socializing the education, innovating in the content as well as the delivery, covering concepts using picture sorting, role plays, and so on, that tap into people's lived experiences.

Traditional interventions focus on two key needs for individuals living with low income to participate in marketplaces as customers or entrepreneurs, namely, financial resources (e.g., microfinancing), and market access.  Marketplace literacy is the third key element. The program develops knowledge and skills, self-confidence, and awareness of rights -  enabling women to be better customers and entrepreneurs. Being a better customer comes with immediate benefits – money saved and better quality purchases. Our program assessment shows a significant proportion of women start a small enterprise or expand an existing one after our program.

We serve low-income individuals in their roles as customers and entrepreneurs, i.e., in the marketplace realm. We do so by enabling them to be more effective customers and entrepreneurs through a deeper understanding of the marketplace.

We have reached more than 100000 women, in urban, semi-rural, rural, and isolated tribal communities in seven countries.

We work with women who are typically homemakers or young adults, and in some cases teenage girls. They share one common characteristic, they live in the range of low income, from extremely poor to the edge of transitioning to lower-middle income. We have also worked with men and children.

 Active versions of our program have leveraged digitized lessons, virtual program exercises, and mobile applications to deliver this education. However these have been supplemental and supported in-person facilitation.

In a post-Covid19 world, we plan a focus on digital "marketplace literacy", looking to fulfill education needs virtually. We propose a digital platform for marketplace literacy that will  design and deliver quality education, while allowing exponentially broader reach through digital content delivery. With more people using social networks, and mobile communication, our digital "marketplace literacy" will address the needs of communities through adaptive bottom up teaching methods.

The first time our program was offered, a woman said that it had educated not just her, but her entire family. By empowering women in poverty to participate in the marketplace and gain material resources, we enable opportunities for those traditionally left behind. 

Savings from being informed consumers has been an immediate, an almost universal outcome. Many families have benefited from new or expanded livelihood opportunities. 

With climate change, sustainability literacy is another dimension of marketplace literacy that we are customizing to different regions.

In a post-Covid19 world, we plan a focus on digital or virtual marketplace literacy.

As a business professor, I felt that our work should focus on much of humanity that is resource-poor, rather than just on those with more resources and large companies. Furthermore, we should study them for their own sake, their own benefit, rather than because they are markets for our products. My journey began in 1997, studying low-literate consumers in the US. We then expanded globally in studying consumers, entrepreneurs, and marketplaces. However, my goal was not just to conduct research but create an academic-social enterprise system where research goes hand-in-hand with practice.  Moreover, I aimed to be truly bottom-up, starting at the micro-level of life circumstances, and understanding how people think, feel, cope, and relate in the marketplace.

It has taken a long time and has meant going in many different directions, but we are at a plateau now and the next giant step awaits. We have worked in four different arenas - research relevant to a wide audience,  forums and special publications for researchers, educators, and practitioners, education for students and managers including international immersion and reaching thousands of learners on campus and online, and marketplace literacy for more than 100,000 women.

The world is sustained by low-income women in ways that few appreciate. They provide the very fabric that keeps communities together. They do so with extraordinary resilience, along with a deep and abiding passion to keep the next generation from the suffering as they have. These women work miracles, taking a small income and using it to support their families, support their children through education, and savings. There is no greater way to learn and expand our imagination than to talk to such women about their lives. They reflect deep character and tenacity, as well as contentment with the smallest things. They take what we do, marketplace literacy education, and multiply its impact by lifting up their families and their communities.  They share everything, including this knowledge.

To be able to impact women positively, and help communities through them, is deeply meaningful to me. To be a professor and impact society directly beyond research and education is a privilege, and to learn from every interaction, a gift.

In the end, I am the most enriched by being involved in this work. I am at the intersection of amazing people who teach me every day.

We are uniquely positioned thanks to academic-social enterprise over more than two decades and a reach of significant scale.  We have a track record of ongoing commitment to the communities we work in, that is reflected in our reputation with them. We have deep relationships, on a global basis, with people who work alongside us in these communities. Yet, we are bottom-up, first and foremost. Our focus is on them and the betterment of their lives and families. This is all the more reason why our project will benefit from the Elevate Prize. We are prepared to reach our goals of widespread deployment in about ten countries with support. Our goals are also in par with the objective of the prize.

We have regionalized and created content in a variety of formats - various manuals, videos, and so forth (www.marketplaceliteracy.org). This enables us to work in a variety of modalities to reach into communities, with our partners, much more than half way. We also have an emphasis and extensive experience on designing education for new contexts (urban, semi-rural, rural, isolated tribal), for different types of beneficiaries (women, men, youth, children), for different types of literacies (consumer, entrepreneur, sustainability), and in different modes (in-person, video-based, and proposing mobile-based).

Our greatest skillset, is working seamlessly on a global basis with minimal resources. We do not have an administrative overhead, period. Yet, our team is connected through our common mission, coming together because of a deep commitment to these communities.

My adversities rarely compare with a single day in the lives of those we study and try to serve, women and families living with low income. The inflexion points in the evolution of my academic and social enterprise have come during times when facing personal adversity due to chronic illnesses within my immediate family. Starting this work in 1997 as an untenured professor, I had spent the previous two years taking care of my wife who was seriously ill after our son's birth.  Since 2011, Marketplace Literacy has grown from about 1000 beneficiaries in one country to more than 100000 in seven countries. Our work is reflected in several books and numerous articles. The communities of researchers, educators and practitioners working in subsistence marketplaces has grown through our many conferences and edited publications, and our education has reached thousands of learners on campus and online. During this same time, my wife has courageously suffered through severe mental health issues, my father passed away due to progressive supra-nuclear palsy, and my younger brother has lived with Stage 4 cancer for years. However, I have the resources to confront these challenges that the people we work with do not have.

My approach is to bring intense energy to our purpose, all of it positive, and to have emotional fortitude to support our field teams. Leadership to me is, first and foremost, about caring and being there, about what we do and how we respond to those who believe in us. Most recently, due to the Covid19 pandemic, all of our field activity was stopped in mid-March, as we would never jeopardize those who work with us. During this programmatic setback, we continue the financial support to the global teams for as long as we can. Leadership has also been about being a “constant”, to the extent possible, no matter what one's own personal situation is. Leadership is not about command and control either, it’s about mentorship and support. Those who work with me know that their development is more important than the work they do with me. Given the status difference, I never behave like “I know more”  but strive to create a climate of mutual learning and respect with each team member. And finally, having persevered through personal adversity, my empathic sensibility guides me to see the whole person, regardless of their role.  

What is new is beginning at the level of individual life circumstances and a deep understanding of thinking, feeling, and coping. New here is focusing on mental capacity, and deeper understanding of know-why. New here is the bottom-up approach to the design and delivery of education that relates back to people’s day-to-day experiences. It is the use of practical, lived experiences that everyday people have… to teach profound lessons on cost, value, time and effort in common terms with common objects. It is the focus on self-confidence and identity building as it related to the marketplace, underpinned by a deep understanding of the individual life circumstances. It is the focus on customized sustainability literacy based on unique climate change effects, in addition to consumer and entrepreneurial literacy. What is new here is using the concrete “give and get” of the marketplaces to apply to other realms of life. What is new here is a unique multi-media approach to expanding the reach of in-depth education. 

What will be unique as innovation, is our ability to use a virtual multiplatform, digital approach to expanding the reach of our programing, using our documented approach with strong grounding in both academics and practice, paving the way to institutionalizing our methods and working synchronously with other sectors. We envision a virtual platform for digital "marketplace literacy" to design and demonstrate, to connect with our partners and beneficiaries, to show how marketplace literacy works, and to enable use of our platform.

Our theory of change comes from more than two decades of academic research that has paralleled our social enterprise. Our insights can be best summarized in one phrase – the things we take for granted. Not only does this include material aspects, but also the richness of the words and concepts we use and think about as a result of literacy and education, and our self-confidence in a variety of realms. We have unpacked poverty in terms of the associated characteristic of low literacy. Our research and insights have been where poverty and the marketplace intersect – relating to how individuals think, feel, cope, act, and relate – how individuals function as customers and entrepreneurs, buyers and sellers. 

With low literate, low-income audiences, there is a strong tendency toward concrete thinking, not understanding words in their full richness (e.g., consumer, enterprise), using single pieces to make a decision without combining with other pieces of information (e.g., just using price), not understanding cause and effect or the “why” of a phenomenon and so forth.  Our beneficiaries often say they never thought of themselves as customers, rather thinking narrowly in terms of being a buyer. The notion of a customer is a rich one that we take for granted – covering identity and self-confidence, awareness of rights, and skills and knowledge. 

To lack literacy and be poor means a women could be insulted by a shop-keeper for asking a question, be cheated constantly, and scolded. It means that self-esteem and self-confidence is close to the surface with activities and interactions. 

To be effective, our marketplace literacy program focuses on the “know-why”, why to be an informed customer, why to choose a business, and so on. We concretize the learning using the lived experiences of the marketplace to arrive at concepts. We localize the learning by working from the bottom-up. We socialize the experience, by tapping into beneficiaries' relational richness in working with others.

Our theory of change also encompasses how we function, bottom-up through deep relationships with people who care deeply about their communities.

We have reached more than 100,000 women over the years. We had reached about one thousand women a decade ago. We would like to reach half a million women through the digital "marketplace literacy" platform within one year of its initiation. We believe that as many as five million women in next five years could become beneficiaries with the investment that the Elevate Prize could provide.  By doing so, we have a typical four or fivefold multiplicative effect of the families of women. We begin to address the problem with a scale in the billions when we reach in the millions and tens of millions. This, in turn, can give us the platform for the subsequent years to come.

Our impact is in terms of savings as customers, better-quality products, and income-generating activities. In pure monetary terms, the gains from marketplace literacy continue as people learn how to learn. Something like a 10-20 dollar savings a month as a customer for instance accumulates over time. Income-generating activities of course can take the gains to a different order of magnitude. And the intangible gains relate to better-quality products, self-confidence, and enhanced well-being.

We plan to take the next step of scale and make it happen in the virtual sphere in the Covid-19 and post Covid-19 era. We hope to reach half a million women in a year. The reach will enable customer savings and enterprise income that sustains for our beneficiaries. It will also place us on a path to achieving the next landmark of 5 million women in five years. We aim primarily for women as they, in turn, benefit entire families and communities, multiplying the impact manifold.

We will emphasize design and demonstration of content that encompasses generic marketplace literacy, consumer literacy, entrepreneurial literacy, and sustainability literacy for different geographies, using different modes while emphasizing the digital or virtual, We aim to develop a virtual institute that will stimulate use of our content while also directly piloting and providing marketplace literacy in specific geographies.

Our largest barrier is the lack capital resources to provision the development of the digital platform, understanding that this includes technical development (digital production and coding), user interface design, content re-formatting for our current intellectual property, and production and development of new content specifically designed for the new format.  Additional (ongoing) support will be required for on-line interfaces, digital storage, web access and new language specific content.

We have managed to provide for the development of the current program through the generosity of small contributors and self-funding from our own pockets. Given the current need, and the large quantum jump in scale we need to take, self-funding is no longer sufficient, if we intend to rise to meet the current challenge.

Parallel to this, in light of Covid-19 pandemic, is the burden of reduced mobility of key staff, at the local level, in most of the world where we work. Our partners are often  doubly burdened, in that the reduced social mobility requires reliance on electronic means for communication. As such, they are often ill-equipped to provide a quality on-line experience to beneficiaries, due to a lack of support equipment in the production and recording stage of program development.

We aim to overcome the financial barrier, to the extent possible, through piecemeal or bricolage means of support. This is why the Elevate Prize would in itself put us on such a pathway for the next 5 years. In the recent past, the grant and partnership funding we have received has been put directly back into program deployment costs and support of our teams on the ground. Most of the developmental cost for that programing has been derived from in-kind support from various institutions and businesses.

With the finical strain and social isolation precautions required during Covid-19, that level of institutional support is no longer available. This will require us to find new levels of partnership and support to accomplish this digital transformation that we seek. Absence this scale of support, we will by necessity have to pick winners and losers, and focus our resource base into a smaller scale project with a limited scope to match the funding available.

Opportunities, such as the Elevate Prize would allow us focus our time and energy on creating content and delivering programing as opposed to the high maintenance required for incremental fundraising and support generation. 

We work with a number of organizations, both larger enterprises and smaller community-based organizations. In Tanzania, we worked with OIKOS East Africa, leading to a large European Union funded project reaching thousands of Masai women. We also work with community-based organizations there. In Uganda, we work with refugees in the Nakivale camp who take our program to others. In India, we work through a locally formed social enterprise, Marketplace Literacy Communities, as well as numerous self-help groups. We also partnered with Madura Micro Finance, one of the leading microfinancing organizations to take marketplace literacy to large audiences. In Mexico, we work with social enterprises like NeuroFinazia and also with universities like Tec De Monterrey and University of Monterrey. In Argentina and Honduras, our field coordinators have worked with a number local organizations. In the USA, we are closely affiliated to Loyola Marymount University and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. We are also able to work with social and commercial by creating programs that are geared toward more specific areas like agriculture and nutrition.

Our team includes the following individuals

Ramadhani Kupaza - OIKOS, East Africa; Marketplace Literacy Project, Tanzania

Cristy Azuara - NeuroFinanzia; Marketplace Literacy Project, Mexico

Elena Olascoaga, Marketplace Literacy Project, Mexico

Luz Sanchez, Marketplace Literacy Project, Mexico

Ernesto Amoros - Tec-De-Monterrey, Mexico

Geraldina Leon - Tec-De-Monterrey, Mexico

Francesca Lucchi - Development consultant

Marie Nyiraneza, Marketplace Literacy Project, Nakivale, Uganda

Ronald Duncan, Marketplace Literacy Project, USA

Steven Morse, Marketplace Literacy Project, USA

Luis Chavez, Marketplace Literacy Project, Honduras

We have used a mix of different business models. 

The central organization, Marketplace Literacy Project, has received small donations. It also received a $75000 grant from the US Dept. of State for a project implemented in Mexico. It also received a few thousand dollars for providing assessment in support of a marketplace literacy program in a correctional facility in Illinois.

In India, our sister organization, Marketplace Literacy Communities, had worked on personal donations of about $25000 per year from the founder's family for about six years. The organization also receives a small royalty from our partner there of about $2000 per year.

Working with OIKOS East Africa, they received a 2 million Euro grant to take marketplace literacy, livelihood education, and microfinancing to Masai women in Tanzania.

The founder and the academic affiliate, the Subsistence Marketplaces Initiative, he created, received a $300000 grant from U of I Extension to take marketplace literacy to the state of Illinois, USA, while combining it with maker literacy and 3D printing.

We use our small funding base to support projects in other places such as Tanzania, Uganda (a refugee settlement), Honduras, and Argentina.

We think of our model in terms of radial degrees of separations. There are projects we drive, and ones which are partners drive and we design and guide on, and projects where partners or others use our content with minimal support.

We view ourselves in the longer term as an educational resource organization or virtual institute that shares a variety of types of content to potential partners and users, focuses on design and demonstration, and creates forums and communities around marketplace literacy. In the medium term, we need to find financial support to drive the growth of marketplace literacy to the next level and to create the platforms needed for users around the world. We sustain in a different sense, through our core team and the shared common purpose. Thus, we do not think of financial sustainability in the conventional sense as we begin and end in the marketplace of ideas around marketplace literacy. Our very rich content ranging from script manuals to videos provides a foundation for other organizations to incorporate marketplace literacy.

We are not engaged in revenue generation to keep the organization going. That path is not a good fit with our goals and could well overwhelm us in terms of our core purpose of being a resource organization for others.

In the last year, we have small donations to the Marketplace Literacy Project, USA.  We have also received payment for assessment work. These sources add up to a few thousand dollars. Going back 3-4 years, we had a $75000 grant from the Department of State. The founder's family has supported a local organization in India started for the express purpose of providing marketplace literacy.  

We get small donations but have not formally engaged in fund-raising to any significant scale. We write grants when the opportunity arises, but these are focused on specific projects and geographies. The Elevate Prize is particularly meaningful at this point in our evolution as the nature of funding is what we need to dream bigger and set our course for the next few years.

Our expenses are in the few thousands of dollars as we support small efforts in Tanzania, Uganda, and Honduras to pilot sustainability literacy for farmers based on local effects of climate change and pilot WhatsApp based lessons.

We are at an important inflexion point in our evolution. We have an extended track record over 20 years, reaching more than 100000 women using a variety of ways to support our enterprise. We have the deep preparation and extensive experience to take our education of different types of literacies (consumer, entrepreneur, and sustainability), in different contexts (urban, rural, isolated tribal), for different beneficiaries (adults, youth, children), in different modes (in-person, video, mobile), with different types of partnerships (driven by us, designed by us and delivered by others). We have the confidence that we can, as in the past, reach the goals that set for ourselves. 

But to take this next step of scale, and make it happen in the virtual sphere of the Covid-19 and post Covid-19 era, we need a larger injection of support than our current resource base can provide.  

The scale of what the Elevate Prize offers, as that next purposed investment, will allow for unparalleled impacts. Reaching a million people in two years will take roughly 30 cents per person, but that reach will enable beneficiary savings and enterprise income that will multiply by the hundreds for years to come. It will also enable the next landmark of 5 million women in five years. We aim primarily for women as they benefit entire families and communities. In summary, the Elevate prize will elevate our endeavor to reach women in the millions and their family members in the tens of millions over the next five years.

We have strong relationships and capabilities in academic research, product design and project implementation arenas. Our “outward-facing” challenge, is overall digital platform development that would integrate and adapt of our proven educational methods and materials into a systematized, user-accessible portfolio of learning modules made available across the spectrum of digital delivery methods and devices. Learner assessments and feedback systems would drive additional elements or modules, as emergent needs are uncovered.  

Our “inward facing” work will utilize this new platform for our radial, degrees of separation model with partners. We will drive projects with our teams across several countries. Our partners whom we work most closely with to enable marketplace literacy within their communities would be the first degree of separation. The next degree would be those we share resources with, providing more distant guidance. Finally, we envision entities who will use our content largely independently, seeking guidance when needed. 

We can, and have, partnered with a variety of social and commercial enterprises and governments who work with low income communities. Our goal would be to help our implementation partners customize design of marketplace literacy and deliver it. We have a track record of partnering with social enterprises (OIKOS, East Africa; Madura Micro-Finance, India), businesses, universities, and government (Department of State, USA). At the same time, we are deeply embedded with community-based organizations at the grass-roots level in several countries. Our bottom-up approach is our strength and enables us to design and deliver education.