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This report provides an overview of the costing data collection, analysis, and findings, presents a discussion of the assumptions, considerations, implications, and conclusions with the goal of informing decision-making and budgeting for mobile-based refresher training in Sierra Leone, as well as other sub-Saharan African countries.
Grameen Foundation and Wells Fargo are working together to catalyze economic empowerment through the transformational use of
Digital Financial Services among women and underserved populations.
WomenLink Phase 1 pilot tested a digital literacy and financial education program based on SMS (short message system). Messages delivered to women’s phones to deepen women’s understanding of Digital Financial Services in an effort to galvanize uptake by new customers and drive greater usage by current ones. The second phase of WomenLink aims to solidify client trust in the system by delivering high-quality service through the professionalization of Digital Financial Service agents. Phase 2 will equip agents with the necessary knowledge and skills through the provision of online training materials and references to support them in delivering a seamless client experience.
Women and Girls Empowered (WAGE) is a global programming consortium to advance the status of women and girls, led by the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative (ABA ROLI) in close partnership with the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), Grameen Foundation, Search for CommonGround (SFCG),and 43 resource partners. WAGE works to strengthen the capacity of civil society organizations (CSOs) in target countries to improve the prevention of and response to gender-based violence; advance the women, peace, and security agenda; and support women's economic empowerment. In this context, WAGE provides direct assistance to women and girls, including information, resources, and services they need to succeed as active and equal participants in the global economy. WAGE also engages in collaborative research and learning to build a body of evidence on relevant promising practices in these thematic areas.
Health shocks are the most prominent idiosyncratic shocks and stresses that low-income households face. Demand for health financing support is often higher than any other financial risk management solution, and demand far exceeds the supply. An improved and expanded choice of health financing options is needed to ensure low-income households have financial instruments to anticipate, respond to, and recover from health events without resulting in increased vulnerability and poverty traps. This will require patient and long-term investments from donors, investors, governments, health service actors and the financial services sector and will require thinking about health financing through an ecosystem lens, where demand generation for and supply of health services and health financing should be designed to intersect.
The Building the Resilience of Vulnerable Communities in Burkina Faso (BRB) project leveraged women’s savings groups as a platform to provide complementary services in nutrition and agricultural education, access to agricultural extension support, linkages to formal agricultural and micro-business financing, and gender dialogues with the aim of improving household resilience. A mixed-methods, longitudinal quasi-experimental research design implemented between 2016 and 2018 found that BRB participants experienced improved food security, dietary diversity, self-perceived resilience and sustained savings accumulation despite an economic downturn experienced in 2017 due to a drought and subsequent poor harvests. Women reported increases in the implementation of new income-generating activities, earned income, the adoption of climate-smart agricultural techniques and improvements in harvest production as a result of the project interventions. There were mixed outcomes in social norms related to decision-making power, fear of spouse, and confidence in speaking out in mixed-gender forums. Despite the inherent difficulty in measuring changes in resilience, the research supporting the BRB project suggests a sense of “bouncing back” among the treatment group after the 2017 drought in Burkina Faso compared to the comparison group.
WomenLink Phase 1 pilot tested a digital literacy and financial education program based on SMS (short message system). Messages delivered to women’s phones were designed to deliver simple but actionable information to deepen women’s understanding of Digital Financial Services in an effort to galvanize uptake by new customers and drive greater usage by current ones.
From vision and strategy to end results, view this snapshot of the WomenLink project and how it has helped to expand financial inclusion of poor and low-income women in the Philippines.
The Grameen Foundation program, “Women’s Savings Groups for Better Reproductive Health in Bénin” advanced opportunities for rural women and their husbands to make choices about reproductive health that best fit their individual and family needs. It built on “Healthy Savings,” an earlier program by Freedom from Hunger (now part of Grameen Foundation). The Reproductive Health program worked with women’s savings groups to combine health savings with access to family planning education and linkages to health providers. The program served 11,590 women in 516 savings groups. Gender Dialogues--facilitated conversations about family planning—engaged husbands and partners in discussion, leading to greater joint decision-making among women and men in planning families and choosing birth control.
This paper highlights the research findings from a quasi-experimental evaluation conducted with coconut smallholder farmers and an activity-based costing evaluation conducted with partners of Grameen Foundation’s FarmerLink program that was implemented in the Philippines in collaboration with the Philippine Coconut Authority (government agency), Franklin Baker Company of the Philippines (coconut buyer), and People’s Bank of Caraga (financial services provider). Combining the power of mobile technology and trusted human intermediaries, FarmerLink was conceived with the primary goal of increasing coconut farming households’ incomes by improving productivity, providing access to appropriate financial services, linking farmers directly to markets, and reducing their losses to pests, diseases and weather calamities. Results from the evaluation suggest improved adoption of good agricultural practices among smallholder farmers and cost-savings through digitizing famer support services among the implementing partners.