Mosabi

Mosabi’s engaging, mobile financial education helps underserved citizens improve decisions and behaviors on their businesses and money. We harness data insights from user profiles and journeys to match them to best fits across a marketplace of digital financial services. Our Mosabi training – the “MBA for the rising billions” – includes topics such as our core business skills, money management, and financial literacy. It also includes complementary upskilling modules on practical smallholder agriculture skills, value chain perspective, entrepreneurship mindset, health, sanitation, digital inclusion, safety and security, and women’s empowerment. Users also benefit from basic literacy and digital skills, knowledge on knowing their rights, and information on holding service providers accountable to client protection. 

There are billions of citizens around the world who are unbanked or underbanked – hundreds of millions of them are in West Africa. At the same time, informal entrepreneurship predominates in less-developed countries. The ILO and OECD estimate that there are two billion people in informal employment globally. In West African countries, it’s up to 95% of GDP. Those informal sector entrepreneurs often have limited formal education and financial literacy and little to no access to capital. Financial exclusion makes upward mobility more difficult, and it generates cycles of subsistence-level income. Informal workers are twice as likely as formal workers to belong to poor households in West Africa. 

Critically, financial institutions that could serve these rising classes of informal sector citizens find it too expensive and inefficient to do so. The challenge of catalyzing value and impact from those lower is often a pain point for providers – it’s also an imperative for strategic growth. There are legions of banks, telecoms, fintechs, insurers, and also NGOs, aid agencies, humanitarian organizations, charities, and governments (central banks, ministries, and social safety nets) facing similar challenges.

Mosabi’s mission is targeted at improving livelihoods and opportunities for low-income citizens working in Africa’s informal sector. The informal sector is essentially “the working poor” – across sub-Saharan Africa, this cross-section is the engine of local economies. Informal activity comprises up to 95% of some countries’ GDPs. It includes low-income citizens who are hustling to build micro- and small business activities, including petty market traders, informal retailers, street food vendors, local transit drivers, smallholder farmers, fishermen, artisans, motorbike repairmen...the list goes on.

We believe passionately that the value we provide underserved West Africans is transformational and practical. The urgency is even greater because of the collective vulnerability of our target learners amid the pandemic. Overindebtedness, productivity losses, anxieties, and diminished capacity to deal with financial shocks could afflict large segments of the country. Our savings content helps users build a buffer for lean times; digital literacy content upskills MSMEs to continue business even amid restrictions on movement; budgeting and bookkeeping content provides blueprints for making sure funds don’t go through the cracks; and our chatbot puts Mosabi as a “digital coach” in citizens’ pockets, helping them choose responsible providers and products that best fit their contexts. 

Before Mosabi we spent years helping informal sector entrepreneurs and MSMEs – hard-hustling workers across the Global South.

Informal segments are the lifeblood of Africa’s emerging economies – up to 95% of GDP in some countries. Traders at local markets, street food vendors, small retailers, artisans, smallholder farmers, family businesses. But financial exclusion and limited education cause pervasive cycles of poverty. We ask, How can we help citizens break those cycles, scale business activities, and build more secure livelihoods for their families? 

Mosabi confronts the Challenge dimension head-on by addressing gaps in knowledge, skills, literacy, numeracy and reliable mobile data.

Mosabi is working hard to bring true innovation to underserved Africans – hyper-relevant learning content delivered through cutting-edge delivery channels in a future-proofed business model. We are making transformative mobile learning sustainable.

Our solution bridging edtech and fintech is unique because of its scaling potential and human-centered approach. Among other edtechs, none connect learners to telecoms and financial institutions; among other credit scoring fintechs, none also provide rich, holistic education. 

We’ve built a B2B business model as a hybrid of a fintech and an edtech. Mosabi is a lifelong learning platform for life skills and financial education that helps our users improve financial decisions and behaviors. We incentivize behavior change through mobile learning and harness data analytics to drive financial inclusion.

Mosabi’s empowering microlearning translates into user profiles and data analytics scoring. We gather engagement analytics and track a user’s demonstrated understanding of the content, while our algorithm generates creditworthiness ratings. Our partner financial institutions view insights on our B2B dashboard – KYC information, e-learning performance insights, loan questionnaire data and our scoring profiles via API – and can offer financial products more confidently and efficiently. This virtuous cycle for both providers and users is the true driver of resilience.

We cement these key competitive advantages together with our approved USPTO patent: Serial No. 62/808,964 which provides intellectual property ownership to Mosabi for the processes and technology to use mobile education to qualify and match learners to financial products.

We have set our sights squarely on impact metrics indicating improved financial health – and more meaningful engagement with services and innovations that can help. 

Our key business metrics are uptake of – and performance within – financial products. This big data approach informs the training of our scoring algorithms. 

For social impact metrics, we track an array of indicators aligned with the IRIS initiative of the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN). Our key impact metric is the increase in the earnings of our users, and the number of local people employed. Indicators also include living standards measurements, baselines and progress-out-of-poverty indexing (PPI). 

We are a growing startup, but we see strong proof-of-concept that our content and platform works. Completion rates range between 12 and 15% – several factors higher than the overwhelming majority of edtech platforms. More than 28,000 learners have gone through our platform and content. We see user affinity, with a net promoter score of 9 out of 10. We are seeing resulting efficiencies for partners that reflect knowledge retention applied to decisions and behavior change. Engagement with our content and platform was predictive of up to 25% higher microcredit repayment rates versus control groups in Kenya. Liberia's Ministries of Health and Education formally measured $4 million in cost savings after our content onboarded government employees to digital salary payments. And, we see knowledge translating into user impact: 70% of users report increased earnings or savings or both after learning through Mosabi.

Mobile phones have provided African citizens with access to digital financial services, information, and expanded networks in unprecedented ways. Increasing smartphone penetration has also created new income opportunities – young Africans can connect, sell goods and services, or find employment opportunities. Nevertheless, unemployment runs rampant and the financial stability of youth and low-income Africans is more dramatically at risk during the pandemic.

In many countries across the continent, only a tiny percentage of workers have regular salaries in formalized positions. By and large, economic activity is broadly characterized by independent, grassroots entrepreneurship and “informal sector” activity. This context is important when we talk about how Mosabi can address gaps in productive skills for better employability and income opportunities.

Mosabi’s engaging, mobile education platform helps underserved individuals and MSME learners improve business decisions and money behaviors. Users are empowered to build profiles based on knowledge gained, unlocking best-fit matches across a marketplace of financial services. Mosabi training includes topics such as core business skills, money management, and financial literacy – and upskilling on trade and digital skills for segments like youth, women and girls, informal entrepreneurs, micro to small enterprises, gig economy workers, smallholder farmers, and more. Our training helps users build practical skills and increase incomes, and lessons and economic incentives are specifically designed to drive behavior change. This helps drive livelihood impact outcomes.

Mosabi’s “Theory of Change” details how we provide substantive impact – for both individual and household livelihood outcomes, but also for societal economic improvement. These drive shared goals for SDG 5 for Gender Equality and SDG 8 for Decent Work and Economic Growth. Account ownership drives empowerment and gives informal sector workers greater control over their financial lives. They access capital to build micro-enterprises, gain safe places to keep money outside their homes and handle finances with greater privacy and efficiency. The formal platforms for digital payments foster strengthened budgeting, investments in business operations and steps toward credit histories. The social impact is also tremendous: household expenditures on health, education and sanitation all increase as returns on investments in education and financial inclusion of grassroots entrepreneurs.

In health care and health technology, there is this idea of “case management” – an integrated system that manages the delivery of comprehensive healthcare services. This allows for services to meet an individual's holistic needs through communication and available resources to promote quality cost-effective outcomes. At Mosabi, we see ourselves as case management for financial health – financial health, stability, and more efficient and productive activities in inclusive finance...for providers, staff, agent networks, and most importantly, for citizens.

Mosabi users benefit from our lessons to make better financial decisions and apply improved behaviors. Mosabi’s microlearning translates into profiles and scoring which ensure users are matched to providers that best fit their context. Scoring is based on preparedness (understanding of content) and risk (alternative data on business activity, budgeting flows, income, etc). Rather than being a digital lender, Mosabi partners with local providers and helps our users evaluate options (as a “digital coach”).

The speed in fintech innovation can be fierce, but it is important to take time to make sure our companies and organizations embrace responsible approaches. Mosabi prioritizes leading practices in human-centered design, inclusive outreach, client-centricity, affordability, data privacy and ethical data collection. 

We are a data science product company. It is important that we stay ahead of the curve on data privacy and protection. It is inevitable that client protection scrutiny in emerging markets will catch up with developed countries. We have built Mosabi around an ethos of transparency and responsibility. 

In fact, our entire platform is predicated on empowering users to understand the details of their data and how to extract value from their creditworthiness. Mosabi is a charter member of the Fintech Protects Community of Practice steering committee administered by the Smart Campaign organization within Accion. We devote significant resources ensuring that our company and platforms are GDPR- and Smart Campaign-compliant. We also work diligently to advance sector dialogue on best practices by stakeholders and weaving in client understanding into our core curriculum.

There is tremendous opportunity to empower our shared target populations with the appropriate resources to develop financial knowledge and skills, build positive financial behaviors, and connect to appropriate financial service providers. This need is still largely unmet. When first building its platform, the Mosabi team had considered building on top of other prominent and “foundational” learning management system (LMS) platforms and commercial software packages. Unfortunately, existing packages in the market all had a glaring deficiency – they did not fully support multiple regional languages. The ability to deploy learning content in local languages is a key element to addressing underserved communities across the African continent. So, we built it from scratch. As a result, the Mosabi team has been able to customize its software and deploy in Krio in Sierra Leone, in Wolof in Senegal, and in Twi and Ewe in Ghana. 

Flexibility and extensibility are at the core of Mosabi's technology stack. We’ve built API access using open standards for our systems to both expose secure connectors for our partners’ systems to access Mosabi data insights and flows, and to hook outward to those systems to draw in data. Because we control our infrastructure rather than outsource it, partners that work with Mosabi can avoid the vendor lock-in that is rampant among many enterprise software approaches.

Our interoperable, extensible technology includes user-facing apps and mobile channels and parallel feature phone interaction (learner-facing), a cloud-based analytics engine, and a web dashboard (partner-facing). 

Because of the “user personas” that we aim to serve, accessibility is paramount. 

Using their phones, our learners work through topics such as entrepreneurship, business skills, understanding financial products, and financial literacy. These topics are delivered through compelling, lightweight lessons across multiple mobile channels. The lessons combine text with multimedia materials, using illustrations, audio, and video to reach audiences with limited literacy or digital skills. Our platform also uses game-ified quizzing, surveys, chatbots, and other messaging to drive meaningful engagement. 

Flexibility underpins Mosabi's technology stack. We've designed our front-end delivery system to be channel-agnostic. This allows for our users to access our courses through their desired user-facing interface: Android app, mobi-site, KaiOS app, or desktop portal, in addition to chatbots on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, USSD, or interactive SMS. It’s important that users can continue their journeys and build their profiles while hopping between any of our various delivery channels, depending on what works best for them.

Cultural customization is at the heart of Mosabi’s approach. It’s a critical success factor to truly deliver value to underserved populations. Our curriculum is driven by our team’s local expertise – lessons are customized to our users’ environments and available in their languages. The Mosabi team designs our content with the target demographic in mind. All storylines, imagery, voiceovers and examples are African. We have developed content in major official languages like English, French, and Swahili...but also local tribal languages like Twi, Ewe, Krio and Wolof. 

To date, we’ve brought our learning content to more than 26,000 individual citizens. 

In the next section, we describe our go-to-market model with “distribution partners”. Our hypothesis is that engagement and completion rates for Mosabi mobile learning content will be higher than for the general public because of the delivery model as trusted partners together. An example is our partnership with World Vision to bring Mosabi’s training and links to financial products to the women membership of their village savings groups programs.

When we combine these factors of approach with our determined focus and priority, it is evident that our scaling user base can reach millions of underserved citizens as we move forward with them on their journey of education, empowerment and inclusion. Because of this, we believe that Mosabi could reach 2 million active learners by the end of 2021. These growth projections for outreach and impact can provide a compelling story for pathways out of extreme poverty for millions of citizens. The last-mile delivery model that we are proposing to create together will also serve the broader community. Mosabi expects that millions of additional citizens in the operational countries will also gain access to the Mosabi solution because of the funding and enabling environment of our distribution partners NGOs.

We expect our user growth to accelerate rapidly because of (a) financial service provider partner choice and (b) go-to-market distribution partnerships. We have a tremendous pathway laid ahead through the scaling possibilities of working with the large footprint of development sector agencies and with larger financial service providers that embrace economic empowerment and financial inclusion.

For underserved populations, the same gaps discussed earlier – in education, skills, and resources – also exist across Latin America and Asia. We are building a scalable product and strategy that lays the groundwork for expansion into these regions. Among the countries at the top of those lists are Mexico and India. Within 5 years, we plan to launch in 20 countries and serve 10 million learners across the Global South. Within 10 years, we aim to have emerged as the worldwide training platform of choice for lifelong learning aligned with global sustainable development.

To date, long conversion cycles have been our biggest challenge. Many of our market opportunities are B2B partnerships with larger corporations and institutions. These entities tend to be risk-averse with slow-moving bureaucracies. Thanks to tremendous recent momentum, a number of these strategic leads are now converting to contracts. We are shortening those cycles as our profile grows.

Similar to other tech platforms in emerging markets, we may face challenges sustaining user engagement and avoiding dropoff. To mitigate this risk, we’re constantly creating an ever-expanding curriculum to truly be a lifelong learning platform. With a Net Promoter Score of 9 out of 10, we notice a sticky relationship even in the early stages. That value-added relationship is further extended through offer prompts for new products, surveys, chatbot engagement, and ongoing creditworthiness scoring. 

We are attempting to truly bridge last-mile gaps. With that being said, there are bound to be challenges. We continued to face and work to overcome challenges in reaching users, engaging them consistently, and providing value to underserved segments.

As stated earlier, we've designed our front-end delivery system to be channel-agnostic. The “nerve center” of our omnichannel approach ensures consistency for learning approaches and objectives, even when content is adapted for one channel or another. Mosabi’s nerve center runs on Dialogflow in Google Cloud platform, allowing an approach that scales to meet needs as they evolve for machine learning, analytics, and natural language processing. By activating these diverse channels, Mosabi can prompt the right content at the right time to maximize usability and retention. Coaching can be built to be pushed to and pulled from various channels as clients move from event to event in their financial lives. 

Our solution is much more than a standalone “app”. Our Android and KaiOS apps do contain many features off-the-shelf that are well suited to the use case of West African citizens with device and data access constraints. These include downloadable content and online/offline functionality, small package size of less than 10 mb, highly compressed and optimized files, a simple and intuitive user interface that uses visual and audio cues, one device download can be shared by multiple users’ unique learning journeys, and simple login with mobile number using SMS authentication. 

Mosabi has 5 full-time core team members and 7 part-time contributors.

We are proud of our differentiated solution – but our team is our biggest differentiator. We bring a team experienced in microfinance, financial education, storytelling and technological innovation. Mosabi is a public benefit corporation working toward Certified B Corp status and supported by a stable of committed, early-stage investors.

Chris Czerwonka (Founder & CIO) brings 10 years with Deloitte Consulting and 7 years in financial inclusion and fintech. He remains a founding steering committee member of the Financial Inclusion Forum Africa, Accion’s Smart Campaign Fintech Protects community of practice, and the RELAY inclusive fintech working group under the World Bank and CGAP.

Patrick Burke (CTO) is a full-stack technology platform and SDLC expert and a DevOps architecture lead. He is a specialist in full-stack design, data science, and cloud platforms. Patrick brings unique perspectives on technology for impact – he was the CTO of a large non-profit fundraising tool with large global charity clients, including CARE.

Kayee Au (Founder & CCO) is a human-centered design and UI/UX specialist who worked in animation and illustration at DreamWorks. She also designed a financial literacy curriculum for an East African NGO campaign. 

Francis Okeke (Director of Field Operations) is an African innovation ecosystem specialist and Amani Institute Fellow. He has been working in for-profit social enterprises and non-profit management for seven years.

Additional key team members will be Jessica Massie, Lulu Limbikani, and Kayee Au – each with over a decade of experience in local and international development, financial capability and financial inclusion.

The Mosabi ecosystem links our institutional *partners* with end-user *learners*. Currently, we have had 8 institutional partners. We work with development sector organizations and INGOs such as the World Bank, the World Food Programme, Cordaid, CARE, USAID, UNCDF, FHI 360, and FSD Africa. We also work with B2B customers that are organizations with strategic priorities for livelihood empowerment and financial inclusion in emerging markets of Africa, Latin America and Asia. This includes banks like Société Générale, larger microfinance institutions that embrace innovation (such as FINCA, VisionFund, and Salone Microfinance Trust), mobile network and technology stakeholders such as GSMA, Africell, and KaiOS, and inclusive fintechs. Eventually we hope to partner with insurance and microinsurance companies, asset financing companies, agricultural value chain actors, and other fintechs such as payment platforms and pay-as-you-go solar organizations.

Mosabi’s business model is a B2B subscription to our alternative credit scoring via API software-as-a-service (SaaS). We produce monthly scoring reports for institutional partners and financial service provider partners invoiced at a small fee per month per user that is an active user of Mosabi mobile learning.

Mosabi is early stage, but we are post-revenue. Specifically, we have sold custom content, licensed content to partners, and been paid by development sector actors to launch in certain countries for various pilots. These milestones, in addition to some competition grant funding, have enabled us to obtain our various proofs-of-concept and have fueled our early-stage launches.

Mosabi has increased revenue each year. Since we founded the company, we have had approximately $350,000 in revenue. By capitalizing on the opportunities in front of us, we can achieve our pathway to sustainability. 

Our scalable business model is to monetize our B2B data insights on our learner journeys as a software-as-a-service. However, we also have had and will continue to generate revenue by digitizing legacy content for partners and licensing of content that we have created. This has the twin benefit of allowing use of these funds toward runway to fully establish the scalable business model, and also not only reducing go-to-market and distribution costs, but turning them into revenue streams.

We have a rigorous economic model and forecasts that deconstructs our unit economics and revenue streams; we are currently on track for profitability by the end of 2021.

We have raised 335,000 USD over two pre-Seed rounds – one in 2018 and one in 2019. Our first institutional funder was Startupbootcamp. 

We have also received grant funding from the World Bank, UNCDF, the Injini African edtech incubator, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore. 

As mentioned above, we have had approximately $350,000 in revenue since we founded the company.

If fortunate enough to be awarded as a winner, Mosabi would put the prize funding toward a $1.5 million budget to execute core activities necessary for the next 18 months of our roadmap: 25% for tech development – to optimize and automate our data science; 35% for content development – to create content that scales to Global South, including our next target markets of Malaysia, India, and Mexico; 30% for core team salaries including key hires like CFO and Chief Learning Officer; and 10% for marketing to fuel expansion and outreach in the markets mentioned. We are also raising a $1.3 million seed round late this year, which would contribute to this as well. 

Funding would fuel our top priorities for strategic markets – continued platform development and learning content production. As we address product features requested by clients, refine strategically important technical stack elements, and scale our data analytics we can capitalize on opportunities in front of us to scale both our sustainability and impact.

We have a burn rate of approximately $10,000 per month, so our estimated annual expense budget is $120,000. This may increase or decrease depending on the evolution of our team, platform components, and business development pipeline.

Our team at Mosabi has built a unique and transformative platform to advance financial inclusion in Africa.

We have seen recent momentum behind positive proofs-of-concept. We have driven efficiencies for our partners, better performance for borrowers, and impact indicators on behavior change and financial stability for our users. The sector has validated our model and approach with notable competition wins and awards, including the Sierra Leone Fintech Challenge, the Singapore Fintech Festival startup competition, and the Inclusive Fintech 50.

There is a promising pathway ahead, but we need help!

We envision the invaluable support from the Mission Billion Challenge WURI West Africa Prize program helping to (a) cultivate newfound partnerships and dialogue, (b) work together on “company-building” efforts to refine our technology, integrations, business processes and commercial models, and (c) target and scale to new markets. In doing so, we can catalyze capacity-building initiatives for marginalized and underserved target populations.

Down the line, we would look back on the Challenge, the Prize, and its support and mentoring and see the origins of our overarching goals for the collaboration/partnership: to build sustainable revenue streams across mission-aligned partner-customers, to reach financial profitability and to drive measurable social impact.

We believe Mosabi’s value for users to be transformational, but also practical. Mosabi can contribute toward SDG 1 – but also 4, 5, 8, 10, 15 and 17. With WURI and the Challenge’s help, we can be empowered to achieve the scaling and impact for Mosabi that we know is possible.

Our team at Mosabi has built a unique and transformative platform to advance financial inclusion in Africa.

We have momentum behind tremendously positive proof-of concept. We’ve driven efficiencies for partners, better performance for borrowers, and impact indicators on behavior change and financial stability for smallholder farmers. The sector has validated our model and approach with quite some competition awards for an seed-stage company, including the Sierra Leone Fintech Challenge, the Singapore Fintech Festival startup competition, and the Inclusive Fintech 50.

We feel like there is a promising pathway ahead. But we need help!

We envision the invaluable support from the Challenge and WURI helping to (a) cultivate newfound partnerships and dialogue, (b) work together on “company-building” efforts to refine technology, integrations, business processes and commercial models, and (c) target and scale to new markets. In doing so, we can catalyze capacity-building initiatives for marginalized and underserved target populations and countries. 

We see pathways for working with B2B partners to upskill their existing user base to generate greater engagement and higher lifetime customer value. There are avenues for us to deploy workforce skilling to field staff, especially those at inclusive financial service providers in emerging markets, to ensure that client-centricity, responsibility, and transparency is understood and in sync on both the demand side and the supply side. 

This includes banks, larger microfinance institutions that embrace innovation, pan-continental telecoms/MNOs, insurance and micro-insurance companies, asset financing companies, and other fintech companies (such as payment platforms and pay-as-you-go solar organizations). 

We launch to new markets with a small, lean local team after we have first established institutional partnerships, both with (1) at least one financial institution partner with an inclusion mandate, which can fuel monthly recurring revenue through our B2B SaaS datastream service subscription and (2) at least one “distribution partner”. We have a fundamental priority on collaborating with distribution partners that target capacity-building across the SDGs. Potential distribution partners include NGOs, government agencies and programs, aid and humanitarian organizations, CSOs, UN bodies, self-help groups, community training initiatives and other grassroots organizations whose mandate is to provide support services to the same demographic that we target – low-income, underserved citizens who are often unbanked/underbanked and usually rely on informal entrepreneurship for generating income. A distribution partner who signs on with us also wants their members to benefit from our transformative education and also link to the financial products of our partner banks.