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COVID-19 Pandemic Impact to Farmer-to-Farmer COCOS Host Organizations

Poor women and usability of mobile financial services

This presentation shares learning from India, the Philippines and Uganda where contextual interviews, facilitated usability sessions and surveys (in respective order) were conducted. Though there may be similar trends to address, there is no one-size-fits-all markets solutions; need localized answers to local challenges.

Lack of focus on design, accessibility and awareness from the perspective of women leads to low uptake and low usage of mobile money services:

• In terms of design, there is low-hanging fruit in spending time with the users interacting with the product interface early. Design for the user, in her words and relevant numbers.
• Accessibility is still a challenge for many women; assisted transactions are not the exception, but the norm.
• Marketing needs to take place where women are

Women and Usability of Mobile Financial Services in Uganda

Top Five Findings:

1. Registration for mobile money is still expensive and inconvenient.
2. Women are stuck at home with household duties so they outsource.
3. Rural mobile money agents are facilitators.
4. Small changes can make a big difference for user’s experience.
5. Customers don’t know how to use mobile financial services independently but with proper training and support resources, they can learn.

Final Evaluation Report_MOTS Service for Community Health Workers in Bo and Kambia, Sierra Leone

This report covers the results from a quasi-experimental, multi-method pre- and post-test assessment conducted with CHWs located in Kambia District, Sierra Leone to assess the effectiveness of MOTS. The curriculum used for MOTS was adapted from the Ministry of Health and Sanitation’s (MoHS) education on vaccinations and community outbreak responses. The Vaccination module focused on the importance of vaccines and receiving them at the correct time; the Outbreak Response module focused on identifying diseases such as Ebola and the protocols necessary to protect people and the community. In addition to IVR-based refresher messages, MOTS also assessed knowledge change with IVR-based pre- and post-test quizzes.

FINAL REPORT MOTS Costing Exercise

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.

WomenLink Phase 2: Baseline Report

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 2: Empowering Women Through Financial Inclusion in the Philippines

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.

WAGE Women and Girls Empowered Overview

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.

Developing Next Generation Health Financing Instruments for Households: Drawing on Lessons Learned

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.

Building Resilience in Burkina Faso: Longitudinal Assessment Results

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.