Mosabi

There are billions of citizens around the world who are unbanked or underbanked – hundreds of millions of them are in sub-Saharan 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 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 income segments 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 is an AI-driven digital playbook for navigating the working and financial journeys of modern life. Our platform boosts financial decision-making, product access and engagement, and overall financial health – and we do this for grassroots entrepreneurs and MSMEs in emerging markets. Through Mosabi toolkits and gamified learning modules, previously underserved or excluded small businesspeople are empowered to engage with digital financial literacy training that is synchronized with their contexts and the products that can help them.

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 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.

The following link show's a 1-minute demo of Mosabi's platform and channels: 

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 countries we serve. 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.

We are proud of our differentiated solution – but our team is our biggest differentiator. We bring a team immersed and experienced in emerging market digital financial services, livelihoods, and technological innovation. We saw first-hand how low-income, informal sector entrepreneurs often have limited formal education and financial literacy, and little to no access to capital. We became inspired and obsessed to solve this pervasive problem by equipping grassroots entrepreneurs with a digital guide for navigating the financial and business journeys of adulthood. Each and every day we are learning and improving and building toward a common vision and mission: to make impact at scale that improves upward mobility for all people and provides pathways beyond subsistence-level income.

Our founders, Francis and Chris, came together after intersecting pursuits in global development impact – in education, financial inclusion, entertainment, and technology across West and East Africa. We both moved to Ghana around the same time in 2014, and our frequent interactions while both living and working there led to becoming best friends – and eventually starting Mosabi. Our Mosabi family is proud that Francis reflects the very demographics and contexts that we strive to serve. He was born into difficult circumstances in Nigeria, emigrated to a more stable environment in The Gambia for secondary school, and has hustled to learn skills and build his pathway by capitalizing on informal networks and alternative education. He is an inspiring example of the upward mobility we want to spark in each and every Mosabi learner.

Mosabi’s platform has served more than 120,000 microbusinesses and grassroots entrepreneurs.

Mosabi's B2B customers range from banks, telecoms, fintechs, and microfinance – as well as the global development sector. Our business model is software-as-a-service, where they subscribe to license our platform, content, and scoring model.

Mosabi's B2B customers of special interest in our sectors of financial inclusion and economic empowerment include Société Générale, Orange, the Bank of Sierra Leone, The World Bank, UNCDF, Trócaire, The World Food Programme, FINCA, and Santander. In 2022 we also kicked off operations for a 3-year, high-visibility, high impact project in Sierra Leone called Women and Girls FIRST ("financial inclusion and resilience strengthening"). Alongside partners such as Jersey Overseas Aid, GTBank, Orange, and CAFOD, the program brings female empowerment, upskilling, and financial inclusion to 20,000 women and girls – and Mosabi is the flagship technology platform provider.

We have seen recent 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 our users. We were named winner of Santander’s Finance for All global fintech challenge, over the past year we were also named Finalist in the 2022 Overall Global Edtech Startup Award (GESAwards), winner of the National Geographic Edtech track at GESAwards, winner of the 2021 bronze fintech award by the Financial Alliance for Women, runner-up of the Women’s World Banking Innovation Challenge, and the regional silver award and global business education discipline bronze award of the Wharton-QS Reimagine Education Awards. We were granted full membership in two global financial services networks: the Financial Alliance for Women and Women’s World Banking International.

We cemented a key differentiator 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. Mosabi was the first fintech to be licensed through the Bank of Sierra Leone’s Regulatory Sandbox. 

But we need help!

We know that the Challenge and Solve could truly unlock some of our bottlenecks to scaling our innovative solution.

Down the line, we know that 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 Solve and the Challenge’s help, we can be empowered to achieve the scaling and impact for Mosabi that we know is possible.

Our solution that bridges 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 do rich, holistic education.

Some big data competitors do invasive harvesting, which could discourage adoption and cause regulatory hurdles. Our unique approach means indirect competitors can also be our closest allies – we work with other fintechs, for example, to help achieve shared objectives for onboarding, adoption, and meaningful engagement of their digital financial services. 

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.

Mosabi envisions a world where everyone has the tools and skills to improve their livelihoods – and where education and access to financial products are available to all. Mosabi can grow and scale impact to add billions of dollars of small business wealth across the Global South. By scaling our platform and model alongside a growing cadre of financial and global development partners, together we can support grassroots small businesses with the tools, knowledge, and financial health for them to thrive and prosper.

Within 5 years, we plan to launch in 20 countries and serve 10 million learners across the Global South. If we support the low-income, informal sector entrepreneurs and MSMEs (including marginalized groups such as refugees, women and girls who face gender barriers, and citizens of post-conflict contexts) with Mosabi's gamified upskilling and product matching, then we can boost the financial inclusion and financial health for 3 million microentrepreneurs across sub-Saharan Africa by the end of 2025. Our key impact targets are that, for those learners, 75% have improved engagement frequencies and volumes with our financial partners, 95% have unlocked access to a new product or resource that they didn't otherwise have access to, 90% change long-term financial behaviors to save more money and miss/default on payments when borrowing, and 99% have increased their incomes. 

In 10 years we aim to be the vanguard platform for client capacity-building and financial inclusion in emerging markets and among underserved segments worldwide.

Elsewhere in the application, we describe our flagship Women and Girls FIRST ("financial inclusion and resilience strengthening") initiative. While we are building an inclusive platform for all MSMEs in our target segments and geographies, Mosabi has a special focus on economic empowerment and financial inclusion for women and girls. 

As founders, our daydreaming never stops! It keeps us awake at night with excitement when we think about how we are on the cusp of cracking a nut for how to maybe, just maybe, reach impact at scale. The same gaps in skills and access that Mosabi tackles exist across the Global South, so we’ve built a scalable platform and strategy. We’ve invested in localizing much of our platform, channels, and content for various contexts across sub-Saharan Africa. But we’re also poised to bring a compelling value proposition to other regions and contexts where it is relevant: Latin America, South Asia, among global migrant and refugee communities, and across the vast swaths of the Global South where rural agriculture predominates. 

We set our sights squarely on impact metrics indicating improved financial health – and more meaningful engagement with services and innovations that can help. This north star metric guides our mission. 

Our key business metrics are uptake of, and performance within, financial products. Operational metrics are tracked via API integration with our partners' core banking systems; customer banks and other institutions see data insights on credit risk scoring, performance and engagement with our content, and other metrics to comply with local market KYC requirements. In turn, we have visibility into user engagement, churn, transaction, and performance data with financial products. This big data approach informs the training of our scoring algorithms. Mosabi helps financial and platform partners create a larger, more informed and better understood customer base – reducing costs to onboard and upskill them, moving the needle on behavior change, achieving meaningful engagement, and driving higher lifetime customer value. 

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 metrics include 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 have several large randomized control trials that show very positive correlations between Mosabi learning completion and better financial behaviors – 25% fewer defaults/nonpayments, higher income after applying new skills, and more frequent savings than control groups. Other data that informs and constantly teaches our algorithm include customer engagement survey data and livelihood progress-out-of-poverty indicators woven throughout Mosabi gamified quizzing. These help us and our stakeholders monitor and measure impact outcomes and track progress against baselines over time.

We’ve build Mosabi’s platform to be able to track, distill, analyze, and report on all of our metrics and key performance indicators. Mosabi’s partners – including investors and other stakeholders – have dashboard access to see real-time insights, run reports, and track aggregated and disaggregated performance across segments like gender, geography, age, and other cohorts to monitor and evaluate the success of our social business.

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.

Mosabi is a “nerve center” learning management system with a cloud-based content delivery network and analytics engine. That nerve center runs completely on Google Cloud platform, scaling to meet needs as they evolve for machine learning, analytics, and natural language processing. End users access our courses through their desired channel: Android app, a mobi-site, a KaiOS app, a desktop portal, as well as chatbots on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, USSD, or interactive SMS. It relies on Google’s Dialogflow product and draws on Mosabi’s ever-expanding content repository in Firebase Storage to provide insightful, bite-sized information to users based on conversational questions and requests. GCP’s suite of products power all automation: Firebase, BigQuery, Firebase Analytics, and Cloud Firestore. For our Chatbot API, we utilize Google’s App Engine and its NodeJS Express API. WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger send information to DialogFlow which then sends it to our backend API.

Mosabi’s nerve center and omnichannel approach leverages machine learning to customize learning journeys, prompt engagement in tandem with financial events, and to harness data with consent for client-centric product matching, and for alternative creditworthiness screenings for thin-file or unbanked populations.

Our Mosabi leadership team is committed to use opportunities we have been afforded to create jobs and opportunities for local colleagues and stakeholders so that, as we grow and evolve, our team is representing the diversity of the populations we serve. We are committed to a diversity and inclusion policy in operations, hiring, and team development. Mosabi has taken active steps to empower a diverse c-suite; our inspiring executive team includes members who are Black and who are female. We aim to create rewarding and meaningful jobs in the communities we serve, and to find and develop talent from among those communities. We search for ways to support fellow companies and peer entrepreneurs who come from marginalized or underrepresented backgrounds and communities. We feel like we can offer connections and introductions in our networks, soundboarding and mentorship on company-building, and we are always grateful for the chances to do so! 

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 financial service provider partners invoiced at a small fee per month per user that is an active user of Mosabi mobile learning. 

Mosabi commercial agreements with financial and distribution partner institutions are licensed and procured according to tiers of target outreach for unique users who can access Mosabi core and custom e-learning modules and build profiles across a variety of channels. Pricing is modeled off of monthly per-user base costs multiplied by the upper threshold for the subscribed tier; the per-user base costs are lower for higher tiers of target users. Contracts are invoiced annually or monthly, and are renewable for each subsequent year. Subscribers can access the full existing suite of Mosabi analytics tools, data insights, and scoring and the included media content license covers all existing core curriculum and localizations – as well as any additional ones as they are added to Mosabi’s central content delivery network.

There is a validated a commercial appetite to pay for that recurring monthly data insights subscription – underpinned by our value proposition for screening efficiencies, better informed customers, and more meaningful engagement of clients. Mosabi also collects a conversion fee for lead generation when one of our users onboards to a partner financial product for the first time.

Mosabi is a pre-seed company, but we are post-revenue and have a solution that is far beyond an MVP. We have a fully operational platform in multiple countries, we have sold MRR and ARR contracts, we have delivered bespoke projects, we have conducted impact evaluation and research alongside prominent partners, and we have licensed content to partners. We have validated proofs-of-concept for our impact theory of change, our B2B value proposition, and our business model. 

Mosabi customers range from banks, telecoms, fintechs, and microfinance – as well as the global development sector. Our business model is software-as-a-service, where they subscribe to license our platform, content, and scoring model.

B2B partners pay tiered SaaS subscriptions (MRR or ARR) to license a co-branded version of Mosabi’s content and platform/APIs – as well as fees for converting new clients to their products.

Mosabi's KPIs for the next six months are 1) continued MRR of a minimum of $12k, 2) continued month-over-month revenue growth of at least 40%, 3) continued month-over-month user base growth of at least 50%, 4) at least 4 new financial services partners onboarded to Mosabi’s embedded product marketplace, and 5) at least 3 new countries covered by new launches. 

Mosabi’s platform has served more than 120,000 users across 25 B2B partnerships, and over the last year we have activated MRR that will make our team and growth sustainable by early 2024.