Chomoka launches this month!

The Chomoka team (Cohort 1) reached an important milestone this month with the onboarding of VSLA groups to start using the smartphone application for their weekly meetings. The team has been working diligently with the developers to test the application and fix bugs to create a stable version of the application that can be rolled out to a wider audience of groups. The team has 100 groups who have pre-registered for Chomoka in the Dar es Salaam area who will start using the application in the coming weeks and months. While the process has taken longer than the team hoped, they were determined to get the product right, using lean experimentation and human-centered design, so that customers have a positive first experience with Chomoka and word of mouth in communities drives demand. The team has 10 Chomoka Agents who have been trained and will be leading the on-boarding of the application with targeted VSLA groups from now into the new year. Check out how the app functions below! (The narration is in Swahili but the screen by screen navigation is in English!)

 

Announcing the 5 Scale X Design NYC Challenge Finalists!

Congratulations to all our Scale X Design Accelerator teams on their inspiring pitches at last night’s Pitch Practice in Atlanta! And thanks to everyone who came out to Atlanta Tech Village to join us for our first-ever pitch event. We are thrilled to announce the 5 Scale X Design Challenge finalists who will compete in NYC on Thursday, January 26 at 7pm. Join us on Facebook Live next week!

CHAT!- Cambodia

Worldwide, young people are leaving their families and migrating to urban areas to seek work. While these workers are particularly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation, traditional NGO programs are ill-equipped to reach them. CHAT! harnesses the reality of young urban factory workers in Cambodia, integrating both entertainment and technology to provide cost-effective and high-impact heath education through a unique combination of hands-on training, relatable video dramas and mobile games.

Chomoka: Digitizing Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs)- Tanzania

For the 2 billion adults without a bank account, Chomoka aims to take traditional village Savings and loans groups and bring them into the digital age with a user-friendly mobile application that provides a pathway to formal financial services by documenting users’ credit histories while streamlining and simplifying the transactions of informal savings groups.

Journeys of Transformation- Rwanda 

When women gain the means to contribute financially to their household, it can upset long-held power dynamics within the family, often leading to conflict and even violence. Journeys of Transformation is a training program that empowers couples to improve communication, positively transform the balance of power between husbands and wives, and reduce the incidents of intimate partner violence.

Krishi Utsho- Bangladesh

While small family farms and plots feed the majority of the world’s population, there are few businesses that cater to their needs and constraints. Krishi Utsho (KU) is a micro-franchise network of small kiosks that sell agriculture inputs, supplies and services to these farmers, particularly women, in rural Bangladesh.

Mobile Application to Secure Tenure (MAST)- Tanzania

For the millions of Tanzanians who don’t have documentation proving they own their land, MAST is a mobile application that shortens the time, reduces the cost and simplifies the process for individuals to claim their land rights.

 

VSLA at 25

The global humanitarian aid and development industry has a problem: innovation is everywhere, but examples of successfully scaled solutions are far less common. Even when we achieve impact at scale, the process can take decades. For example, it took 17 years for CARE’s Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLA) to go from idea to widespread impact, economically empowering millions. CARE’s Scale X Design (SXD) Accelerator was created to bridge that gap between innovation and impact. Two of the SXD teams’ innovations, Chomoka (Digital VSLA) and Journeys of Transformation, contain a VSLA component. Here is a story about VSLA at 25 that appeared in CARE’s latest edition of Impact Magazine.

MMD cash boxes hold the contributed savings for the community in Genki, Niger.

CARE Village Savings & Loan Associations: A Transformative Innovation Then — and Now by Shawn Reeves

For 25 years, CARE Village Savings and Loan Associations have powered change through innovative economics. It all started with a few women, a lot of ingenuity and a lockbox in remote Niger. They engineered their own financial independence by saving pennies a week, then loaning one another money to start businesses such as making and selling peanut oil, doughnuts or home remedies. The interest they paid on their loans came back to them as profit. They had become their own bankers.

A quarter-century later, some 15,000 CARE savings groups operate in all reaches of Niger, their 500,000 members, mostly women, meeting regularly, depositing, saving, lending.

Some of that expansion happened strategically. Some of it happened organically, as people saw the success of CARE savings groups and wanted to share in that. The program may have started in Niger, but it didn’t end there. Further investment from CARE and word-of-mouth from passionate group members soon extended the concept to places like Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia.

Today, more than 200,000 CARE VSLAs operate in 26 African countries and in parts of Asia and Latin America, having engaged more than 5 million people. Enterprising members have found through those groups the financial freedom to improve life for their families, whether through better health and more nutritious food, expanded access to education or even savings-based safety nets that help families withstand and overcome disaster.

CARE now looks to the next frontier for its VSLA initiative, aiming in the next 25 years to help VSLA members more closely guard their assets — chiefly by linking them to formal banks, where their accounts are safe and accessible through smart phones and money-transferring apps. CARE already has begun linking VSLA groups to formal banks in places like Tanzania, Kenya, Ghana and Uganda. And by fall 2016, CARE had announced plans to link a half-million more people to banks by 2020.

But the benefits of formal banking don’t end with added security. Access to banks yields more sophisticated financial services that groups inevitably need as their resources, skills and confidence grow. It means larger loans, which groups demand as they mature. One report shows that linking members to banks can double both their savings and their profit.

As the next generation of VSLA members reaches for and seizes its own financial independence, some of them will still meet regularly under shade trees in Africa’s most distant villages. Others will convene in urban centers. They’ll adapt the model to ever-changing contexts. And they’ll continue to use the power of saving and lending to transform their lives and communities.

WSJ Video: Big Data: The Link Between Information and Financial Inclusion

Watch this video from the Wall Street Journal developed by CGAP, the World Bank’s financial inclusion unit which provides a short summary of the link between the growth in data generated by mobile phones and financial inclusion. It was shared with us by our Chomoka (Digital VSLA) team. The video raises the benefits and risks associated with this trend.

As the leading promoter of savings groups in Africa, CARE has established and willing users, more brand recognition and more understanding of the barriers these groups face than anyone else. We believe have a better shot than anyone else at getting a large number of people to use the solution, which is key to success. By being the provider of the solution that generates data on group trends and behavior, we also effectively can serve as a layer between that information and the growing range of financial service providers looking to bank groups and group members. By creating a marketplace- rather than tying our platform to a single financial service provider- we can promote competition and only market financial products to users that are designed with consumer protection and consumer prosperity in mind from the outset. We’re excited to see what happens in the future with digitizing savings groups!

Meet the Teams: Chomoka (Digital VSLA)

Over the past 25 years, CARE’s VSLA (Village Savings and Loans Association) model has revolutionized efforts to help low-income women improve their lives. Not only has CARE enabled 5,000,000 women and men to form and manage these life-changing groups, we have driven a global savings-led movement, engaging NGOs, banks, governments and donors in a journey that puts women and their savings first. Our efforts have resulted in over 12,000,000 members of VSLAs and groups like them as NGOs from global to local have replicated the CARE model. Members are routinely improving their lives through investments in education, health and entrepreneurship and women’s increased control over resources is leading to improved quality of life and opportunity for themselves and their families. VSLA has quite simply changed the game for poverty reduction. Through Chomoka (Digital VSLA), CARE is poised to do it again. This new initiative will empower low-income women to build a new generation of VSLAs that not only improve access to finance at the community level but also open doors to the digital economy that is rapidly transforming the world we live in and – until now – far too often leaving low income women further behind.

Chomoka is an emerging social enterprise driven by a proprietary mobile application used by VSLAs to manage their records, access banking services and gain advisory support from a trusted network of Chomoka agents. Once deployed at scale, Chomoka will accelerate and deepen formal financial inclusion while increasing usage of digital financial services in rural areas. The platform will generate an unprecedented, real-time data stream on the financial behavior of un- and under-banked groups and their members and offer new insights into the size, scope and behavior of these groups. Most importantly, Chomoka will enable groups to more effectively and accurately manage their transactions while also establishing digital financial histories and connections that open up a world of new possibilities. Chomoka expects to have over 1 million group members using the application by 2021.

CARE_HORIZ_2c1

Meet the Team

Mwimbe Fikirini | Program Coordinator | CARE Tanzania

Mwinbe Fikirini is the Program Coordinator with CARE Tanzania, and for the last several years has planned, lead, organized, directed and evaluated implementations of financial linkage activities to the VSLAs groups in areas of operation including Morogoro and Zanzibar. Mwinbe brings extensive knowledge of VSLAs to the team, having also trained and monitored the adoption of financial linkage and Financial Education skills by VSLA members. Going forward, Mwinbe will translate the proposal into a viable activity at the field level, including VSLA engagement in product design and testing, VSLA training on the developed solution and formulation of a realistic, field-level scaling strategy. For the past two years Mwinbe has been leading the LINK Up project in Tanzania, the largest effort by CARE to enable VSLAs to access formal finance. She holds a Master of Arts in Gender and International Development from the University of Warwick obtained in 2012 and a Bachelor of Laws from University of Reading obtained in 2009.

Christian Pennotti | Senior Technical Advisor | CARE Tanzania

Having worked across CARE for seven years, Christian has a strong institutional knowledge and relationship needed to move the project forward and find the right institutional fit. Christian is the overall LINK Up program manager responsible for program quality, design, M&E, partnerships and donor engagement. He is the chairman of the project steering committee and will serve as the lead in identifying and coordinating with project development partners and other external stakeholders including donors and prospective investors. Christian is a recognized leader in market development and is frequently invited to present at industry events. He sits on the Board of Directors of Farm Shop Ltd in Kenya and is the Chair of the Board of Directors at the SEEP Network. He holds a Master of Arts in International Development from George Washington University obtained in 2005 and was a Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan where he founded a branch of the National English Teachers Association in collaboration with local officials.

Ken Banks | Entrepreneur in Residence | CARE International

Ken Banks, Founder of kiwanja.net and creator of messaging platform FrontlineSMS, devotes himself to the application of mobile technology for positive social and environmental change in the developing world. He has worked at the intersection of technology, anthropology, conservation and development for the past twenty-five years and, during that time, has lived and worked across the African continent. He is a PopTech Fellow, a Tech Awards Laureate, an Ashoka Fellow and a National Geographic Emerging Explorer, and has been internationally recognised for his technology-based work. In 2013 he was nominated for the TED Prize, and in 2015 was a Visiting Fellow at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. In late 2015 Ken was appointed CARE International’s first Entrepreneur in Residence. He is also a published author, with his first edited book, “The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator,” self-published in late 2013 with a follow-up, published by Kogan Page, released in March 2016.

Mark Malhotra | Innovation Advisor | CARE International UK

Mark Malhotra, Innovation Advisor for CARE International UK supports a number of social enterprises that CARE owns and operates globally. He provides technical support to the teams from business planning and financial modelling to operational guidance and hands on support. Prior to joining CARE Mark spent six years working in the telecommunications sector with a focus on marketing and partnerships. He has extensive experience working across organizations with IT, finance, sales and brand teams. He moved into the NGO sector through overseas placements in Jamaica with a local organization and in Egypt with the Aga Khan Foundation.

Karen Vandergaag | Analyst | CARE Access Africa

Karen is an analyst with the Access Africa program where she supports the LINK Up program’s monitoring and evaluation, CARE’s VSLA management information system, and the human-centered design process for the Digital VSLA project. She has previously spent time in Malawi working a youth entrepreneurship initiative, and a year in Brazil on a cultural exchange through Rotary International. Karen holds a Bachelor of Business Administration Honours from Okanagan College.