Uniti Networks : 360 digital inclusion

Two billion people do not have access to low-cost smartphones and the digital apps and services that could completely transform their lives.  UNITI provides an integrated hardware, software and humanware solution designed to accelerate the digital adoption journey for the bottom billion.

We combine high-touch onboarding and customer support alongside high-tech mobile technology to streamline and optimise customer engagement with a curated app suite.  UNITI's app suite is comprised of locally-relevant apps that will contribute to the physical, social and financial well-being of households and communities. We work in partnership with mobile data providers, last-mile delivery partners and providers of digital services and mobile apps ranging from financial and health services to agricultural and educational technologies.

Scaled globally, the transformative potential of affordable, high-quality devices and curated service delivery will provide equitable access to the digital economy, drive social and economic improvement, increase quality of life.

Two billion people can’t access the digital services that could immediately and measurably improve their lives. 

Lack of digital literacy and a stable delivery channel makes it too expensive for providers of beneficial apps and digital services to economically acquire low-income and remote customers.  Organizations who have deployed resources to impact this lack a standardized, scalable solution, so each one spends time and money on a well-meaning but bespoke and limited solution.

And even with access to a smartphone, those with limited digital experience find it incredibly difficult to navigate the app landscape, and understand which banking, health or community apps to download, register with and use.  It is a very real barrier to adoption and sustained use. 

This problem is vast – and we have spent three years breaking it down  and simplifying it to find the technological, financial and operational pressure points that will allow UNITI to remove the key frictions that prevent broad participation in the digital economy.

UNITI provides an integrated hardware, software and humanware solution designed to accelerate the digital adoption journey for the bottom billion.  We combine high-touch onboarding and customer support alongside high-tech mobile technology to maximize user engagement with our curated Services Suite. 

The product consists of:

• a Service Suite – digital literacy, agtech, fintech, mobile health, and educational apps – that come preloaded or can be downloaded
• the Uniti App, for each user to access her profile, store personal data in a secure and portable wallet and track progress towards life goals
• a high-touch onboarding process to verify user identity to banking standards, and create frictionless single sign-on for all Suite services
• impact measurement with Keystone Accountability, giving a 360° measurement of social and economic value created across the platform.

It’s built by combining:

• Mobile Device Management (MDM) for curation and onboarding, and to push new services to new users customers, continuously
• Data and identity protection: a secure and portable data wallet
• Biometric security, stored locally on the phone, so the correct user accesses her services, and reduces risk for service providers
• Appified versions of 2g/3g services including USSD and IVR, to build a seamless smartphone transition for users and service providers

Our solution targets 2 billion people in the world who cannot currently access the range of impactful digital services already available in emerging markets. They range from urban and peri-urban low income families to remote, rural smallhold farmers. Yet their barriers to digital access are the same: 

1. Resources: They’re resource poor, so can’t afford smartphones and data plans.
   

2. Education: They have limited or no formal and digital education. This means that they find it hard to learn about new, digital methods and resources to meet their financial, health, education and other needs.

3. Relevance: Even if they know of services and their benefits, barriers to access push digital inclusion off of their radars; they don’t see the relevance of the smartphone to the problems they experience in their day to day lives. The devices are associated more with media consumption than accessing banking or healthcare.

4. Gender: They are disproportionately female. GSMA data, and our own user research in Ghana (and broader) show that women are significantly less connected to the internet than men due to diminished access to education and financial means. 

We are doing extensive user on-site research through interviews and surveys, both with consultants, and our last-mile delivery partners to understand the granular needs of users to ensure that our app suite deployed to each context is tailored to their ability, language and service requirements.

UNITI is also designed to solicit frequent feedback from users on the device, called the Uniti Impact Pulse.  This helps us constantly iterate our product and impact framework by working with sample groups of target users, starting in Ghana. We are working with pilot groups in rural Ghana (Asumura, in Brong Ahafo), and in urban Ghana (Adenta, Accra). As we refine our service suite for both contexts, and iterate our accessibility or ‘humanware’ layer, we have immediate term goals to scale up with wider deployments in partnership with Care International, Innovation for Poverty Action and select others.

The Uniti solution will address the needs of these target users by impacting all four barriers by changing the market dynamics of underserved areas. 

1. Resources: We provide low-cost Android smartphones with a monthly data package to each target household. 

2. Education: We partner with last mile delivery partners (including INGOs and other organizations) to be our trusted Guides. Their staff, who are already working with our target users, help them create accounts, set goals, and register for services.

3. Relevance: Our curation, training & support and constant feedback loop will ensure the apps and services delivered carry maximum relevance.
   

4. Gender: We prioritize women heads of household. This is not only to address the disparity in access, but also to achieve the maximum social impact. Traditional responsibility for families and households means that women’s financial literacy and stability is key to family community health and wellbeing. Our solution is specifically aimed at providing digital access to critical services that support financial and digital literacy and provide financial, educational and healthcare tools that can be utilised in off hours, removing the need to sacrifice precious working hours. While we are still in active user research, we believe women heads of households are our key target market.

“Equip everyone… with culturally relevant digital literacy skills to enable participation in the digital economy.”  The concept of Uniti Networks was created two years ago to do exactly this.

We combine technology and existing providers of logistics and digital services into a self-sustaining ecosystem that provides both training and relevant digital resources to those who cannot readily access it due to circumstances, financial means, gender, education, location and ability.  Our solution not only helps people participate in the digital economy, but also directly improve their lives and that of their family and community.  

We have built the prototype of our product and will test in two phases.  The first is an intensive, limited but on the ground product-market-fit exercise where we test the prototype on 10 screened users outside of Accra in July 2021.  We will have frequent interviews and formal and informal feedback mechanisms to refine the registration process, and application suite usability and relevance. 

Product improvements will be deployed for the second Pilot phase:  a full 100+ user pilot together with three partners in September 2021 in Asamura, Ghana, which we expect to scale to 2,000 users within 6-8 months.  The initial 2-3 month pilot period to evaluate both operational deployment and support services at scale, how the infrastructure functions (eg, our mobile data hotspot provider), and statistics on usage and relevance on a larger population with a wider variance in literacy.

Our main innovation is combining and repurposing existing and emerging technologies so our solution remains both affordable and relevant.

We extensively researched commoditized smartphones that are sufficiently low cost - but with key required specifications - so we can economically put smartphones in user’s hands.

The edge computing architecture keeps data costs low by keeping functions on the phone and not in the cloud.  This means the “smartphone level capabilities" needed to get the real digital inclusion value out of the device (versus limited feature phones) can be extracted without unaffordably high data costs.  Also by avoiding problems of cloud infrastructure performance, our product works better offline and with unreliable internet connections.  

Second, the MDM software allows us to deliver new services to customers based on their feedback within days. This ensures our services stay relevant and we can continuoulsy adjust where we see higher rates of customer engagement and impact.  We can also onboard new revenue generating service providers quickly, as well as create new "service modules" for, eg, agricuture.

Third, the solution is standardized - it works on almost any Android smartphone, which makes it very scalable.  This innovation positions us to extract cost savings for users via bulk data purchases from network operators or devices, and gives us the flexibility to work with a broad range of logisitics providers and organizations seeking phone deployments.

Collectively, this means that we’re positioned to be both sustainable and profitable as we begin to scale.

Today, we serve zero people, as we have not yet launched.

We will launch with a focus group in Ghana in July 2021 to test our prototype, identify technical and usability issues, and to ensure that our users will clearly value the Uniti platform.  We will then scale up to launch a full pilot in rural Ghana in September 2021, soon followed by a randomised control trial across a number of communities with Innovation for Poverty Action.  

In one year we expect to be serving 10,000 people, and in five years 1.4 million people.  In the initial 12 months it is critical to develop increasing product market fit and strong user engagement in rural and peri-urban environments.  Key in the following years is scaling.  Once product market fit is nailed down, we can push our focus towards (1) scaling in Ghana, then (2) scaling in West Africa and then (3) regionalizing our response across different Global South countries and user types, such as for agriculture.

As mentioned in our Theory of Change, we use survey and device usage data to track our impact on users’ lives over time. We correlate progress through all services to reported:

1. increased earnings

2. increased savings

3. financial planning confidence

4. financial product uptake

5. increased optimism for future prospects (career, wellbeing and family)

6. decreased anxiety for future prospects (career, wellbeing and family)

7. career progression/ business improvements

And we correlate progress through services to monitored

1. increased use of services in suite

2. increased use of playstore and browser (braver service use and knowledge acquisition)

In addition to these core KPIs, we encourage our users to set goals in one or all of our areas of impact (health, livelihood, financial planning, education and community). Our weekly ‘constituent voice’ surveys ask users to report on their progress against these goals in addition the above, so we acquire a clearer understanding of which services drive progress towards which goals.

By mapping the trends above to different combinations of service usage, we identify the common pathways and the most successful strategies for improving user outcomes for specific user types (e.g. gender, occupation, location).

Finally, we also have an early stage project underway which would use an app suite on our platform to provide independent, locally crowd-sourced KPI verification for Green and Sustainability Linked Bonds.  Finding a way to directly combine this KPI measurement use case with projects directly tied to the well-being of our users is exciting and high potential.

Nine.  We have four full time staff, three part time staff, and two contractors in Ghana. 

Our project team within Mimik for the edge technical build is four people.

Systemic challenges demand diverse teams with diverse networks. UNITI is building this team.  Our core members have built careers in global development, telecommunications, mobile app development, impact measurement and resilient connectivity infrastructures.

Kami (CEO) was the co-founder of Devex (www.devex.com), where he led product development and technology innovation for 20 years, building strong relationships and networks across the development ecosystem.

Susan (COO) has experience leading complex, large-scale projects and internationally distributed startups, as well as scaling telecoms and digital and retail consumer businesses.  She mentors Series A tech startups for scaling strategy.

Jacob (CTO) has tech experience across large complex organizations (Roche, Digital CTO and Digital Transformation Lead) and startups (Founder, Medtep) where he was responsible for both product and technology.

Linda’s (Head of Product) experience in Haiti and focus on digital transformation in the UK government provides product leadership to create alignment between cutting edge technology and the socio-economic considerations of equitable implementation.

Chris (CFO) was an emerging markets tech entrepreneur, then EM investment banker, then returned to invest in fintech and legaltech startups.  He brings traditional finance and fintech networks, product market fit expertise, and does our legal-financial-compliance functions.

Kennedy and Moses, based in Ghana, have the experience across tech, telecommunications, and statistical surveys of user engagement in Ghana and Africa. 

Jana Kakar (Board Chair) was the Global Managing Partner Emeritus of Dalberg (dalberg.com) brings a global development management consulting mindset and deep contacts in ESG / SRI / impact investment space.

UNITI would help enable - and be enabled by - the global Solver network.

We are applying to Sovle because we are a platform which partners with other like-minded businesses and organizations to deliver their digital apps and services to the bottom billion.

UNITI is not only a technology innovation, but an ecosystemic innovation: a model where we pool, and in many cases repurpose, existing resources to reduce customer acquisition costs of each individual business to deploy their solutions to populations in need, and create highly leveraged impact.

Monitoring & Evaluation.  We have sector expertise, and are currently working with epxerts with granular field and technology expereince in monitoring and evalaution of social impact.  However, the knowledge base in this space is vast, and innovative teams are consistently creating innvoative new use cases, eg, we were approached by an ESG/SLB boutique that believes the UNITI product would be ideal to crowdsource KPI data on a mangrove forest repopulation project.  The range of concepts across the Solver network could lead to entirely new M&E use cases.

Product / Service Distribution.  We reduce the cost and increase the efficiencies of distributing digital services.  Finding new digital applications to distribute via the UNITI Suite would be accelerated via the Solver program.  Furthermore, using our MDM and surveying technologies to push new apps and solutions to the user base, can help other Solver teams test their own apps in the field to help evaluate product market fit.

Technology.  We are partnering with organizations like Bluetown https://bluetown.com/ to deliver innovative technology solutions to promote access and affordability for digital inclusion.  There are many more innvoations underway, and we expect the Solver community to be a rich ecosystem to discover, ideate, collaborate and implement innovative technology solutions to accelerate the impact we plant to achieve.