Technology and Innovation

Digital solutions are instrumental in increasing program scale and impact. Village Enterprise has been an early adopter of technologies and continues to innovate: our first-time entrepreneurs now receive their start-up capital as a digital cash transfer across all areas of operations; our business mentors can access training materials and video review modules digitally on their tablets and our field staff can proactively monitor their businesses’ and business savings groups’ progress using award-winning dashboards and adapt their mentoring appropriately. To enhance our program further, we are now expanding digital training videos and remote phone mentoring. Our long-term goal is to increase the profitability of our entrepreneurs’ businesses by developing a complete digital toolset that helps them reap the benefits of technology.

Over the last few years, Village Enterprise has continued to grow in the use of cloud-based technologies to track and run operations and internal organizational processes, including finance, monitoring and evaluation, document management, remote meetings, human resources, donor relations, and grant management and project management. We are working towards integrating systems to create bridges, relationships, and visibility of functional data across the organization.

Given the nature of technology solutions needed for our program, we are actively developing strategic partnerships with telecommunications and technology regulators in sub-Saharan Africa, device manufacturers, service providers, and learning institutions to help us reimagine our technology journey.

Our frontline staff are required to extend the use of technologies to program participants and ensure that they can use digital tools to access knowledge, learning, processes, and resources. We have developed a structure for ensuring that staff across the organization gain digital skills necessary for delivery of a technology-enabled program.

We plan to build a technology framework that makes efficient use of resources and resonates well with overall organizational strategy, while at the same time mitigating possible risks from inappropriate use, and non-adherence to international standards and best practices of the technology discipline.