Literacy and training platform for financial inclusion

A digital financial inclusion platform that creates a network effect across women in underserved communities through a digital transaction journey led by young women change-makers who handhold and mentor others to draw value from savings, financial planning, financial safety, and credit.

What is your solution?
A digital financial inclusion platform that creates a network effect across women in underserved communities through a digital transaction journey led by young women change-makers who handhold and mentor others to draw value from savings, financial planning, financial safety, and credit.

How does it address the challenge question as posed?
Lack of access to technology and financial knowledge/tools have historically placed women at a massive disadvantage. There is an opportunity to address this and support women to leapfrog through the entry point of digital transaction, and harness opportunities offered by financial inclusion.

The solution brings together digital connectivity, localized need-based content, early adopters, solution providers and a behavior change journey to bring in the dynamic and long-term shift to the digital ecosystem and financial inclusion.

If scaled, how will it effect change across the world? 
The participation of low-income communities, especially women, in the digital transaction and digital financial ecosystem needs to be an informed one with value driven choices that empowers these communities. The platform will not only provide implementation insights into catalyzing the network effect in a closed community but also demonstrate a market-linked development framework. The content creation process, the components of training, the tech-development for the platform, the engagement of service providers and business development will create an ecosystem based model for low-income community clusters. 

The specific problem the solution solves is of increasing adoption and usage of digital transactions. It does  so through following solutions: a)Creates an entry point for women and poor communities to engage with digital transactions b) Makes this shift sustainable through awareness and literacy d) Creates and showcases successful user cases that show benefits of financial inclusion in the long-run and interim through value added services e) It demonstrates network effect as a way of behaviour change in a low income but close knit community. 

We believe women with entrepreneurial and artisanal skills in low-income communities will not only enter but thrive in digital transaction ecosystem if they are made aware of the long-term benefits through a customized and contextual hand-holding by early adopter peers, with support from a platform that is based on mobile and supported by value adds through services like credit, financial planning, marketing and business development. 

The solution brings together digital connectivity, localized need-based content, early adopters, solution providers and a behavior change journey to bring in the dynamic and long-term shift to the digital ecosystem and financial inclusion. 

The solution will target adoption and active usage of digital transactions by women and households in low-income urban clusters. 

The entrepreneurial/artisanal engagement and use of financial planning tools, the value added services, credit etc will be used actively by the women in the community.

The solution will be provided through mobile awareness and literacy platform which connects with Unified Payment Interface (UPI). The solution will be deployed through young women who will be mentored as change makers as early adopters. 

Track the IVRS broadcast outreach through mobile numbers - 500 women and households become active users of the platform

Track download and number of transactions on a monthly basis - 500 women start using UPI payment to send and receive digital payments

Voice based survey and ethnographic study - Women start showing interest in financial products

The platform creates a complete user journey from awareness to actual usage and creating market-linkage through payment solutions. It will be driven by the early adopters in the community for creating network effect towards adoption and usage of technology and financial inclusion.

The design of the interface, the content, the training aspects and the medium will be created within the community, through a process that involves the women and administered through voice-based interactive content. The relevance of the content and its value will crowd-sourced from the community. 

The community will be able to access the solution through their mobiles, the service providers will provide connectivity and the partner organization in the community will be embedding the process. There will be no cost for the user and the data cost will be subsidized. The content will be in local language and delivered in a format that works best in low literacy and technology deficient community.

Catalyst is funded by USAID for developing products and solutions around digital transaction adoption and usage across lowe-income consumers and small merchants. The funding provides for a lab to test and create models for scale. The baseline research is underway and funded already, we now are getting to the stage of creating wire-frame for the platform through tests and ready to implement it. Catalyst has a partnership with state and central governments in India providing huge policy influencing opportunity which will allow us to scale this initiative, this is apart from financial service providers who are co-creating ideas and business models for last mile fintech for financial inclusion. 

The financial decision making and access to technology are strongly controlled by men in the community. Since the community is very poor, there is an averseness to taking risks or even experiments. The shift to digital transaction ecosystem needs a behavior shift and willingness or sense of value to drive the shift.

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The Solve opportunity offers validation of the theory of change we have on creating a shift towards financial inclusion through the digital transaction. The resources, finance, and mentorship will provide visibility and possibly scale for wider implementation and learning. The solution we are working on is linked to a complex interplay of existing socioeconomic and gender determinants, these are not unique to our geography or demographics so we hope to benefit from the global perspective or narrative. Since our idea is to create innovative, sustainable and scalable models, Solve potentially provides an opportunity to leverage all of these.     

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None that we can think of.