In just a few weeks the mobile ecosystem will gather at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, to discuss the future of the mobile industry and celebrate the winners of the Global Mobile Awards, the most highly sought after awards in the global communications industry.
GSMA mWomen will be profiling the shortlisted nominees for the 2014 Global Mobile Award for “Best Mobile Product or Service for Women in Emerging Markets”, which aims to salute an innovative product or service specifically designed to meet the wants and needs of underserved women in developing countries. For the next two weeks, we will publish a series of short interviews with each nominee that discuss their experiences developing services for resource-poor women, the challenges they faced, and advice they would give organizations looking to target similar markets. Our first blog in this series is below:
Nominee Profile #1: Millicom – Tigo Ghana Market Women MFS Project
Can you give us a summary of the Tigo Ghana Market Women MFS Project, your mobile financial services project targeting women in Ghana?
The Tigo Market Women Project (MWP) is a financial empowerment project through which Tigo Ghana, in a 6 month period, has been able to offer 6,000 market women from 88 markets across the country access to much a more secure savings scheme and convenient access to other financial services.
Why did your company choose to develop a [product, service, distribution model, device, application or other innovation] for resource-poor women?
‘Susu’ is a local parlance for micro savings; one of the oldest forms of financial transaction in Africa. This system allows people to save money with a trusted individual by making daily deposits which they access the after an agreed period of time. This is usually monthly, quarterly or annually.
This system is typically used by the unbanked and the less literate. The major risk associated with this kind of micro financing/savings has been the disappearance of some trustees with people’s life savings. The Tigo Cash Market Women’s project was developed to solve this age-old problem.
What were the key challenges you faced?
The mainly challenges with this project were:
- Dealing with people’s reservations about doing transactions in a cashless system,
- People’s perception of the use of mobile phones, especially for the use in financial transactions and
- Literacy levels of target groups: ease of using Tigo Cash on their phones.
What advice would you give a similar organization looking to develop an offering targeting resource-poor women?
The first step will be to go beyond identifying the inevitable need of the targets to embark on consistent, innovative campaign to educate these potential customers on the benefits they stand to gain from the product offering. Of course, the success story of Tigo cash could always be a good reference point – especially on how this transformed the lives of other women in Ghana.
Nominee Profile #2: Vodafone Foundation, Cherie Blair Foundation and the Self Employed Women’s Association RUDI Sandesha Vyavhar project
Can you give us a summary of the RUDI Sandesha Vyavhar project, your mobile ERP tool for women entrepreneurs in Gujarat, India?
RSV is an ERP solution with a mobile App powered by an SMS platform for data transfer that operates on simple mobile feature phones which dominate the rural context in which RSV is used. Extremely cheap to use, RSV enables Rudibens to order stock from the field (often distant villages), receive important updates from the RUDI company in real time, and run reports on their business – all with the convenience of automated text messaging on feature phones.
Why did your company choose to develop a [product, service, distribution model, device, application or other innovation] for resource-poor women?
Research by the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women and the GSMA showed that 300 million women in developing countries are missing out on the mobile technology revolution and subsequently a host of socio-economic benefits. The RUDI network approached the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women to support them with overcoming inefficiencies in their supply chain, which they estimated meant that 15-20% of RUDIbens’ stock requirements were not being met. The Vodafone Foundation in India is committed to using innovative mobile technology to improve people’s lives.
Why do you think it is important to bring mobile technology to women at the base of the pyramid? What were the key challenges you faced?
The ubiquity of the mobile phone makes it one of the most far-reaching pieces of technology and an excellent channel for reaching women often cut off from other basic services. The use of mobile technology in the RUDI supply chain was a means to improve the incomes and boost the livelihoods of women entrepreneurs whose businesses were otherwise prevented from growth through inefficiencies in the local infrastructure. Challenges include making the interface simple yet effective and building the necessary confidence in women to trust their business (and therefore income) to a new technology – Peer support from other women who had achieved significant increases in profits were key to this process.
What advice would you give a similar organization looking to develop an offering targeting resource-poor women?
Madhu Singh Sirohi, Head- Vodafone Foundation – “The primary objective before conceiving a solution should be to scientifically observe and understand the need from the women’s perspective. An offering conceptualized in the closed conference rooms may be innovative and attractive but could potentially miss the target for its beneficiaries. A need-based solution – often very simple – can deliver better value to the ecosystem. The key is to capture the end users ‘need’ with patience and accuracy.”