Did you catch Cohort 2 Alum, Iman El-Mahdi, in Shondaland? ( the pioneering storytelling company behind many television series including “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Scandal”) Congrats to Circles of Change on the amazing attention you’re bringing to CARE’s work! Read the story here: https://www.shondaland.com/act/a21239255/timesup-metoo-and-the-global-movement-for-womens-rights/
It’s great to see cohort 2 alumni, #A-CARD, has just published a blog in FinDev gateway: https://findevgateway.org/blog/2018/dec/agriculture
In their lessons learned, the team cites how we had to learn the hard way about incentivizing our scalers – loan officers!
“The introduction of the A-Card has not been without its challenges. We have found that microfinance institutes (MFIs) sometimes experience a conflict of interest between offering A-Card and microfinance loans. Since MFIs earn only a 1 percent profit on A-Card and a 25 percent profit on standard loans, they have more incentive to push standard products on customers instead of offering the A-Card. To avoid this, the team is experimenting with individual local market actors like input retailers or Local Service Providers as a banking agent for this pilot.
Another lesson learned from the A-Card is that local bank staff didn’t have incentives to sell this product because it was not tied to their performance goals. We are currently working with banks to develop new incentive structures to overcome this.”
The motivations and “what’s in it for me?” perspective of our scalers – the people that we rely on to implement, promote and expand our innovation solution – are often the most overlooked! A-CARD’s incredible impact on farmers won’t matter if loan officers don’t promote the solution.
Learn how a simple change to loan products – flexible repayment schedule – can mean the difference between a profitable year or barely making ends meet for farmers in Bangladesh! Lalon is one of 4,000 smallholder farmers benefiting from A-Card. See his story in this short (3 minute) documentary.
