As part of Village Enterprise’s poverty graduation model, these 26 women from Cherukusi village have all been equipped with the training, startup cash, and mentoring to launch sustainable micro businesses. Every Thursday, they have their business savings group meeting, where they save weekly earnings from their businesses and provide small loans to each other—with repayment, including interest. With the income earned from their businesses and the savings and loans from their business savings group, these women are breaking the cycle of poverty for their households and better providing for their families.

But the ringing of the smartphone signifies that this isn’t a traditional business savings group—it’s part of Village Enterprise’s pilot of the DreamSave app—a digital savings ledger designed by DreamStart Labs. Instead of using paper ledgers to record their weekly savings, targets, loans, and repayments, the Tapoyen business savings group is using DreamSave.

Grace Chemtai, the chairwoman of Tapoyen group, which is named after the Tapoyo tree, a thick reddish bark tree that thrives in arid areas and whose branches are commonly used as a whip to herd cows due to its durability, enthusiastically praised the impact of the new savings app. DreamSave keeps track of each member’s attendance, savings, and credit records, significantly transforming the way they organize and conduct their meetings.

She said using the app had helped cut down meeting time by more than half—from two hours to about 45 minutes—while also boosting members’ attendance and savings, as they know the meetings would not take up precious time they could be using to attend to their various businesses.

“Attendance has improved since we started using DreamSave. Even the amounts of money we save have increased,” she said, adding that group members did not want to miss meetings because they know the app will use the attendance records to determine an individual’s commitment to savings and their ability to repay a loan.

DreamSave is changing the game for rural groups that have never used a smartphone before. Under Village Enterprise’s graduation model, which has lifted thousands of women and their families out of extreme poverty, the app is quickly replacing manual ledgers that are tedious to keep and occasionally prone to human error.

Reducing mistakes in financial records has also boosted the trust of members in their savings group’s elected officials that their money is safe.

Still in its pilot stage, DreamSave is proving to be a vital tool that not only makes it simpler for the business groups to run their affairs but also makes it possible for the economically disadvantaged to be financially included—ensuring that no one is left behind.

So far, a dozen groups—each with 30 members—across Kenya (West Pokot), Uganda (Soroti) and Rwanda (Rulindo) have started using DreamSave. These groups have recorded an average 50% increase in savings and 85% increase in meeting attendance, according to data gathered by Village Enterprise’s technology team.

The app also saves time for Village Enterprise’s business mentors who set up business savings groups, oversee their operations, and train new entrepreneurs on how to run their businesses and maximize profits. With the reduced time required for each group meeting, business mentors can now visit more groups each day than they could before.

“Technology can help us reach more people and have a greater impact on our effort to end extreme poverty. That’s exactly what DreamSave has helped us do in the regions we’ve piloted,” said Meshack Mbinda, Senior Director of Technology Solutions at Village Enterprise.

“We’ve observed that groups using DreamSave consistently emerge as top savers in their regions,” he added.

After a successful pilot, Village Enterprise now plans to roll out DreamSave to all regions of operation in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda, with a long-term goal of having all business savings groups using the app by 2025.

In Chekurusi, a middle-aged woman chuckled looking at a smartphone after receiving Ksh.2,000 (about $13) as a short-term loan to get more feed for her poultry business. Her loan would be payable in a month’s time.

“DreamSave has brought us change, peace, and happiness!” Grace said amidst a symphony of approval from her group members.

The post Armed with an award-winning savings app, women in Kenya are combating poverty appeared first on Village Enterprise.

When Lotorupe joined Village Enterprise, she was 45 years old, a widow, and the primary caretaker for eight children all living together in a small mud house. Having never been to school or owned a business, she struggled to feed her children and pay for their school fees.

But through Village Enterprise, Lotorupe launched a business buying and selling goats alongside two other widows. In a region where women are traditionally not permitted to own animals—nor even allowed near livestock markets—they were collectively challenging what was possible for women in their community. And it worked. Because of the skills and training they learned through Village Enterprise, their business took off. Using the increasing profits from their business, Lotorupe was able to diversify her income by launching an additional business on the side of selling groceries, as well as keeping chickens to earn and save even more.

As a part of the Village Enterprise poverty graduation model, Lotorupe also joined a business savings group—a group of 30 entrepreneurs working together and meeting weekly to build savings, assets, and save for emergencies. Traditionally, the group records are kept in paper books, but as part of our DreamSave pilot program, Lotorupe’s business savings group began keeping all their records on the DreamSave app on a smartphone. This not only helped them maintain more accurate records, but the app sent notifications reminding Lotorupe of her savings targets and even sent celebratory alerts when she reached her goals.

Created by DreamStart Labs, the DreamSave app was piloted by Village Enterprise in 12 communities in Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda. Lotorupe loved the app so much that she eventually exceeded her savings targets. Having originally set a target of putting aside $275 USD, she ended up saving $350 USD and was able to build her family a brand new tin-roofed house. She was also able to use her profits to purchase a donkey, which she uses to fetch water and reduce her fatigue, and she has plans to sell the donkey’s offspring to further her return on investment.

Utilizing DreamSave not only encouraged and motivated Lotorupe on her business progress, but it helped her savings group become much more efficient. Their meetings grew shorter, allowing more time for the women to return to operate their businesses or run errands. DreamSave also helped the women increase their literacy skills, and they became more resilient to climate change as a result of their success. Having saved money for emergencies, digitized their records, and purchased household assets, they’re more prepared to handle unprecedented situations.

It’s been over a year since Lotorupe joined Village Enterprise, and she’s tremendously happy with her business and how much money she’s been able to save because of DreamSave. She’s been able to provide consistent, healthy meals for her children, and is now confident about what the future holds for her family.

Village Enterprise is continuing to expand the DreamSave pilot, with the goal of having all business savings groups on the app by 2025.

The post Lotorupe’s Story: Building savings, resilience, and a brighter future with DreamSave appeared first on Village Enterprise.

We’re proud to report that the study showed overwhelmingly positive results, and a sustained and often increasing impact for our entrepreneurs and their families. In fact, both household consumption and savings continued to rise after the end of our program with an 83% increase in consumption and a 933% increase in savings over five years. You can read the full report here.

“We’re thrilled to share our new longitudinal study results, which show sustained or improved results for the households we serve five years after participating in the Village Enterprise graduation program,” says Celeste Brubaker, Chief Impact Officer at Village Enterprise. “These findings are complemented by our recent external RCT results, which found no evidence of declining program impact over time. Results from both studies are especially remarkable given that final data collection for both took place in 2021 when millions of households in Africa were being pushed back into poverty due to the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. The data builds a compelling case that Village Enterprise graduates first-time entrepreneurs into a state of resilience.”

Building resilience is extremely important in Sub-Saharan Africa, as the negative impacts of climate change, inflation, and the pandemic all have the potential to be catastrophic for families living in extreme poverty. The results from the longitudinal study provide more strong evidence that our program equipped entrepreneurs with the skills they needed to adapt to the negative economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, suggesting their ability to adapt to future crises, or global and local shocks. Of note, 88% of the entrepreneurs in this study also reported the skills they learned through Village Enterprise helped them cope with the economic shocks of Covid-19. 

The longitudinal study results are especially meaningful as they build on the results from the Village Enterprise Development Impact Bond. Independently evaluated in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) by IDinsight, our program achieved a projected lifetime benefit-cost ratio of 540%. In other words, for every $1 invested in the communities, over $5 of new income is generated by our entrepreneurs. The social benefits far exceed what it cost Village Enterprise to implement the program, including training entrepreneurs, awarding seed capital grants, and providing ongoing business mentoring and support during the first year. This showcases the immense power of our graduation program to sustainably and cost-effectively increase the income of our entrepreneurs, putting them on a sustainable path out of extreme poverty. Just like our longitudinal study, the RCT results were achieved despite the onset of the pandemic and the subsequent market closures and country-wide lockdowns.

On top of these achievements, we have made significant improvements to our program since 2017. These improvements include the implementation of a powerful adaptive management system, a streamlined and more interactive training curriculum, and the use of digital technologies—such as videos and mobile cash transfers—to maximize our efficiency and overall impact. Since these improvements were implemented after entrepreneurs in the longitudinal study graduated from our program, we hope to see even greater results for our entrepreneurs in future studies.

To further magnify our impact in the years to come, we plan to continue testing the latest technologies and methods for training, coaching, and evaluating. Most importantly, we will continue to keep our entrepreneurs at the forefront of everything we do. In an era of increased global shocks from Covid-19, conflict, and climate change, it is imperative we make sure the most vulnerable families have access to our program, equipping them with the skills and resources to adapt and thrive. To learn more about the Village Enterprise longitudinal study, read the full report using the link below. 

“In addition to confirming the persistent and often growing impact of our program in the communities we serve, the report contains important insights on outcomes for different population segments and the mediating influencers of impact,” Celeste says. “This is a fantastic read for anyone interested in learning more about fostering entrepreneurship and resilience among women living in extreme poverty in rural Africa.”

Read the full report here.

The post Results from the Village Enterprise Five-Year Longitudinal Study appeared first on Village Enterprise.

According to a Global Systems for Mobile Communications report, the mobile ecosystem in sub-saharan Africa supported 3.8 million jobs directly and indirectly in 2018.

Further, increased digital technology adaptation is associated with a larger share of women working in the services sector, nearly two and a half times larger for women than men. Yet, less than 33% of the population has digital connectivity, with a significant gender gap as only 23% of women have digital connectivity. The most significant barriers to technological adaptation in sub-Saharan Africa are affordability, literacy, and digital skills.

One of Village Enterprise’s strategic priorities for the next three years is to develop innovative digital solutions that revolutionize small business development in Africa. Zita Akwero, the Village Enterprise Regional Manager for the northern and midwest Uganda regions, works to decrease this gap through the use of digital technology such as TaroWorks.

TaroWorks is a mobile data collection app that enables users to collect data in low or no network coverage areas. Later—once the user is in an area with better coverage—the data can be sent to a designated online server synced. The Village Enterprise monitoring and evaluation system uses TaroWorks in this way to collect and track data about the delivery of our program’s five components: targeting, business, and financial literacy training, seed capital disbursements, mentoring, and formation of savings groups. Zita, along with other Village Enterprise managers, uses the data to evaluate program implementation and staff performance. The use of TaroWorks increases staff technological competency, making them more competitive in the job market, and exposes poorer rural communities to the power of technology.

With over 80% female entrepreneurs in the Village Enterprise program, Zita understands the significant role technological innovation can play in pursuing gender equality and believes that the TaroWorks platform is the key to jumpstarting this pursuit. She describes its role in her own words below.

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Sometimes I sit and imagine what our office would be like if we did not have TaroWorks –it would be filled with paperwork. Every staff member uses the platform, whether it be registering entrepreneurs, completing business grants, or monitoring training session attendance. TaroWorks is the critical engine in our adaptive management system. It enables our business mentors to track our entrepreneur’s small businesses’ health on the dashboards and prioritize mentoring entrepreneurs who are struggling. The system allows for the collection of data in real-time and increased transparency in information sharing. It has improved the efficiency of our program as well as overall confidence in decision-making.

Technology is power in this present era. Most individuals living in rural areas of East Africa—especially women—have limited exposure to technology, which intensifies the correlation between lack of technological access and poverty. Village Enterprise’s program addresses this problem with our business mentors’ ability to demonstrate business health data on tablets to entrepreneurs in the field, thus introducing women to technology they otherwise would not have access to. We observed an increase in mobile phone ownership among entrepreneurs after being exposed to technology through the Village Enterprise program, demonstrating increased comfort with and confidence in digital literacy and skills.

The use of technology in the field also benefits our staff, both in terms of their own skill growth and in their ability to perform their jobs at increasingly high levels of effectiveness. It is nearly impossible to find a quality job in Uganda or Kenya unless you are technologically competent. The use of TaroWorks acts as a form of professional development that will make our field staff more competitive within the Kenyan and Ugandan job markets. And through technology, our staff is empowered to give informed advice and support to our entrepreneurs.

In turn, the technology we deploy, along with our staff’s technological skills, leads to improved business success and technological awareness for our entrepreneurs, most of whom are women. 

One of the ways that Village Enterprise’s use of technology supports our entrepreneurs—mainly women—is in helping with schedule tracking. In Africa, women are responsible for the majority of household duties. Many of our female entrepreneurs report feeling overwhelmed with household duties, taking care of their children, and pursuing business ventures; understandably, they often have a difficult time tracking their business goals in addition to caring for their families. Our mentors can use TaroWorks to illustrate a business group’s performance relative to their targets. By showing them their progress, we also remind them of their participation responsibilities. Entrepreneurs are not allowed to miss more than two training sessions before they are expelled from the program. Business mentors use TaroWorks to monitor training attendance and inform entrepreneurs if they missed a training session. These reminders allowed us to re-engage over 1,100 Ugandan female entrepreneurs in 2019-2020 who might not have otherwise realized they missed a training session.

Economic equality is a lofty dream and will remain a dream as long as we fail to look upon ourselves as members of a global nation. Technology presents us with opportunities to work as one, connecting all people—regardless of gender—with collective growth opportunities. TaroWorks is just the start, but we must continue innovating until every individual has an equal shot at sustained success.

The post Technology is Power appeared first on Village Enterprise.

Patricia stops and turns to the room. “What is happening?” she asks. A few people raise their hands. They all agree that when you have one source of income flowing through the pool, daily living expenses will consume most of that income. Then she demonstrates what happens when you add water from another smaller bottle and then a third and a fourth. She explains that when we have one source of income flowing into the pool, we will always spend that income on expenses, which will cause our businesses to fail. But the more sources of income we have, the more profit can flow into the pool. With this strategy, we can both meet our expenses and continue to grow our businesses.

If Patricia hadn’t used those water bottles in such an interactive and engaging way, the audience probably wouldn’t remember her lesson. Merely lecturing and speaking at people is a standard teaching style in Uganda, but it’s not very effective; it leaves people bored and disengaged. They feel that they can get by without internalizing the teachings, and questioning what they are learning is uncommon.  At Village Enterprise, we used to use this method. We spoke at people and wrote critical points on a flipchart. We used a 184-page business training manual to educate new entrepreneurs. This style was effective in a sense as it did manage to start thousands upon thousands of successful businesses — but the lessons were dense.

Most importantly, this method was somewhat inconsiderate to our entrepreneurs, many who have not yet had the opportunity to learn to read or write. We realized that our training curriculum was too long (15 modules and a 184-page business training manual), and our teaching method was not very engaging. Therefore our entrepreneurs were only able to understand and retain some of the concepts that were taught.

So, we did something about it.  

In early 2019, the Innovation Team came together and deconstructed Village Enterprise’s complete manual. Using the Human-Centered Design approach, a methodology used across the organization, the team took an in-depth look at our overall training curriculum. They pinpointed the key learnings and excluded anything that wasn’t pertinent. They also brainstormed activities that would demonstrate lessons that were important to running a business and ways of involving the entire class in theatre inspired roleplay. By re-imagining the training manual, our team created a new training manual that was engaging and memorable.

After deciding on several ideas, the Innovations team tested them in the field. With the help of a few business mentors, they inserted a few new ideas into a regularly planned training. Some ideas worked. Some didn’t. The team took the well-received ideas and included them in the new manual. Rather than assuming what our communities would understand and be receptive to, our team tested and then tested again. 

The next step was finding a way to illustrate these ideas in a way that everyone could understand. We hired an artist based in Gulu, Uganda, who took our ideas and transformed them into picture codes. These colorful graphics were then printed onto waterproof material and bound to plastic piping. This way, our business mentors could travel to the field and quickly flip through the picture codes while teaching.

Before we sent the new training manual into the field to use with our new entrepreneurs, our Innovation team held workshops in Uganda and Kenya to teach our staff the ins and outs of the new manual. The implementation of the new training manual began by splitting our staff into three groups. Each group received one module to study and discuss. 

After deliberating and exploring the content, each group presented their module as if all of their colleagues were entrepreneurs. The result was an interactive experience where everyone learned by watching each group present the content from their assigned module. After each presentation, there was time to share feedback. This was an essential part of the process because ideas and comments shared during this period influenced the training manual’s improvement.

One thing emphasized during the workshop was the idea that business mentors are storytellers. They were encouraged to use stories and picture codes to teach. Rather than lecturing, the new manual advocates the use of interaction and questions. How do you teach someone who cannot read or write the concept of Value Addition? You use a story, hold up the picture codes, and ask the future entrepreneurs to figure out what’s going on in the pictures—learning by doing—learning by interacting—learning by observing and listening and taking it all in.

Our training manual was reduced from 15 modules (184 pages) to nine modules (42 pages). Each module uses a standardized structure, focusing on three key learning objectives that are both critical and applicable to our entrepreneurs. Each learning objective is introduced with a participatory activity. And finally, each training module concludes with application activities that allow our Business Mentors to gauge retention and where extra support is needed.  

The new manual for Business Mentors is only available on tablets and computers to eliminate paper. A digital format enables instant updates and changes to the ever-evolving document easier. 

We have heard from countless business mentors and other staff members that the new training manual is more effective and that our entrepreneurs are walking away with a better understanding of what it means to run a business, add value, increase profit, and how to save money. Vicky Achan, a business mentor, based in Kitgum, Uganda, noted that between the two manuals, “The old one was a bit hectic, and the new one is easier to learn and to deliver to our program participants: these new training manuals have picture codes, so even an illiterate person can see what is happening. I also like the educational roleplay, which they can learn from.”

Five months after the initial rollout of the new training manual, we held a refresher workshop. We introduced the business mentors to modified versions of the picture codes based on the feedback we received from the field. This is one of the most critical aspects of our approach to improving our program: continually listening to the people we serve to bring the most useful resources to their communities.

The new training manual brings our staff and communities to a better and more engaging state of teaching and learning. It encourages creativity and playfulness. It asks people to look at their daily lives and their available resources to see how they can learn from those things. It challenges people to stay engaged and to learn intuitively. We are still in the beginning stages of the new training manual, but, so far, we are beyond excited by the results.

The post Innovating the Way We Train: Digitizing our Training Manual appeared first on Village Enterprise.

Three business owners in Paicho, a sub-region of Gulu, Uganda, lead Village Enterprise team members through thick grasses, along long, winding, dirt paths, to a large field where small, light green plants have recently appeared from beneath the soil. In three months, these small cotton plants will be large and tall, ready to be harvested. 

During the first half of 2019, Village Enterprise linked 274 business groups to the cotton value chain. This pilot focused on the Northern Uganda region (both due to the availability of worthy private sector actors, proximity to innovations leads, and potential of success and impact due to the prevalence of fertile land and business owners with agricultural experience). The pilot was implemented in all three districts of Northern Uganda operations (Paicho, Nwoya, and Kitgum) and the implementation varied slightly depending on the district. 

At first, some communities were hesitant to grow cotton. Village Enterprise has also never encouraged cotton production because the seeds take a long time to mature, which meant business owners were only harvesting once per year; growing cotton was a bad business practice and wasn’t profitable. But due to improved seeds, the cotton can be harvested after only four months. We decided to use cotton production for our market linkages pilot in northern Uganda. 

What’s the history of cotton in Uganda?

Under colonialism, the British colonial government split Uganda into several regions of agricultural production. Each region focused on producing a specific cash crop: sugar and tea were grown in the central region, the Eastern Region produced sugar, the West produced tea, and the Northern Regions produced cotton and tobacco. After independence, the production of these crops for export prevailed in their given regions, and for many years they were regulated by marketing boards at the national level. During the era of structural adjustment (1980’s) the marketing boards were dismantled as the agriculture market was privatized. However, the cotton value chain remains highly regulated by the Ugandan government. The cotton industry (everything from farming to ginning to exporting) is overseen by the Cotton Development Organization (CDO), which falls under the Ministry of Agriculture. CDO is the only organization allowed to train cotton farmers (or issue certifications or approvals to train) and also approves designated areas for organic cotton production. CDO has formed a very close relationship with our private sector partner, Gulu Agricultural Development Company, and has approved them to train and certify organic cotton farmers in Nwoya and Gulu districts. However, Kitgum remains approved for conventional cotton only.

The Innovations Team spent a few months researching and vetting potential private sector actors to engage in our market linkage pilot. We decided to work with Gulu Agricultural Development Company and the Cotton Development Organization (GADC/CDO). GADC has demonstrated experience and reach. They are extremely well respected in both the agriculture and development sectors within Uganda. They have 10+ years of experience in engaging small-holder farmers and are the leading producers of cotton and organic sesame for export. They also have an outstanding field network system; GADC staff is among the best partner teams we’ve ever encountered. They have an extensive presence in the community —  from their office staff to their field team. And the most important component is their dedication to improving the lives of farmers. 

So how does it work?

 GADC provides training, business owners use their grant money from Village Enterprise to purchase improved seeds, the plants grow and mature, and then GADC buys the cotton directly from the business owners. GADC checks-in with our business owners to ensure that their crops are growing well and provides and assistance that may be necessary. It’s a completely community-based operation because GADC has field teams based in the villages where our business owners are located. Village Enterprise business owners are aware of GADC and know exactly where their cotton will be taken once it’s been harvested. There is no middle-man scamming them or using faulty scales. GADC also takes care of all transportation costs, which eliminates another typical burden farmers face. GADC also offers our business owners the option to take out a loan from them to hire ox and plows, which allows for more productive farming.  

GADC is also a completely sustainable business. Once our farmers have sold their cotton, the crop is taken to a factory in Gulu where the cotton is separated from the seeds. The seeds are milled and turned into soap, animal feeds, and fertilizers. There is no waste in this operation. 

At this point in the pilot, it is clear that this project is providing business owners with a sense of comfort because they know there is a guaranteed market for their crop. The elimination of this worry encourages them to care for their crops and it also provides time for them to invest their energy into starting other businesses on the side for additional income. Because they know their cotton will be sold, they can take a chance and diversify. 

We will have an update for this project in a few months once our business owners have harvested their cotton. 

The post Linking to the Cotton Market appeared first on Village Enterprise.

Over the past year our staff from different functional teams (finance, programs, etc.) of both country offices, began the process of redesigning our disbursements to ensure the safety of our staff and business owners and maintain the integrity of our disbursement process. Using insights gained from field observation and focus group discussions, the team used Human Centered Design to synthesize learnings from the field as well as from other organizations (lessons learned from the BOMA Project, GiveDirectly, etc.) to design a solution for disbursements using mobile money.

As we approach our first destination, tension builds. Aneno has been in extensive conversation with MTN Mobipay, the mobile company assisting us with this process. Mobipay is a technology solutions company that provides customizable bulk payment systems. They were able to develop a custom system tailored to our financial reporting and operational needs in less than three weeks. The system is easy to use, low cost, and can be further developed and customized to accommodate our systems as needed (e.g. work with Taroworks and new accounting software,  NetSuite). The biggest concern we have with this new process is whether or not our business owners will be able to access cell service. The first group we meet moved a few kilometers from their usual meeting point in order to connect to a strong network. Without that network, the business owners will not be able to receive their grant money through our mobile payment.

How do mobile money disbursements work?

All business groups have to register a new line to ensure group ownership. Lines are registered in the names of one business owner (who has a national ID) and all members need to know the pins. SIM cards are left in the savings box and checked out when needed. When confirming registration with mobile carriers, Village Enterprise uses in-country partners (Safaricom and Mobipay in Kenya and Uganda respectively) and confirms that the list of new phone lines are registered to the correct names and have enrolled in mobile money. Any inconsistencies are addressed. When sending money to approved lines on the day of disbursements, the list of lines is approved again and then the money is disbursed (two-level approval process in line with the approval matrix). Any groups unprepared to receive their money are removed from the list for disbursement at a later date. Once business owners receive an SMS confirming the money has been deposited in their accounts, they sign the hard copy receipts. At disbursements, business owners can withdraw their cash through a mobile money agent, who is present with cash. Groups can withdraw what they need to start the business at the disbursement location.

The first group is gathered under the shade of a large, protective tree. Aneno, Zita, and business mentor Otim Norbert stand in front of our business owners. Aneno begins explaining the process of our mobile money grant disbursements. We soon learn that there are some problems. Some of the business owner’s pins aren’t working, which means they won’t be able to receive the money. We scramble to fix the issue. We’re on the phone with our team in the Gulu office. Someone’s contacting MTN. Another is manually resetting pin numbers. We need this experiment to work.

After two hours, we are ready and we tell Cissy, our Finance and Administration associate in the Gulu office, to initiate the disbursements. We are all waiting in great anticipation. Cissy logs into her account and selects the business owners she needs to grant money to, and then submits the request. A few moments later, we hear the welcome sound of phones ringing. We all begin cheering and singing and dancing. It worked!

This moment was monumental for Village Enterprise. With this new process, we will be able to disburse grant money in a safer, more efficient fashion. We are excited to see how this process will continue to develop and scale in the coming months.

The post Mobile Money Disbursement appeared first on Village Enterprise.

In the 30 years since Village Enterprise was founded, a lot has changed. Our program has grown tremendously in both scale and nuance. We’ve embraced innovative digital solutions for data collection and management. But what has remained the same over 30 years is our belief that when given the right tools, people living in extreme poverty develop the capacity to lift themselves from poverty. We believe the extreme poor are hindered by lack of opportunity, not by lack of potential.

We believe the same is true of refugees.

According to UNHCR, there are 25.4 million refugees worldwide, the highest ever recorded. Worldwide, 1 in every 116 people has been forcibly displaced as a refugee, asylum seeker, or internally displaced person. Over 1.5 million of those forcibly displaced live here in Uganda. Since 2013 over 1,000,000 refugees have fled to Uganda from South Sudan alone. Uganda, where roughly 27% of the population live in poverty, has some of the most progressive policies toward refugees in the world. Refugees can work. They can participate in markets. They can move freely. They are viewed as an asset rather than a drain on Ugandan society. Uganda shares our belief that when we invest in the potential of even the poorest and most vulnerable, we all do better.

This isn’t always easy. The consistent influx of refugees has placed pressure on the humanitarian sector to expand humanitarian response interventions for the growing number of new entrants, while also offering sustainable livelihood interventions to refugees to reduce aid dependency and promote sustainable escapes from poverty. Earlier this year, Village Enterprise worked with Mercy Corps to examine whether the Village Enterprise program could be adapted to help meet this need. We engaged in a rigorous process, using Human Centered Design, to understand the unique challenges and opportunities faced by refugees in Uganda and adapt our program accordingly. (Check out IDEO.org to learn more about this fantastic process of building solutions with people, for people). We spent four weeks in three settlements in Northern Uganda, including Bidibidi (one of the largest refugee settlements in the world), talking to people, immersing ourselves in context, and trying to absorb as much learning as we could. Our process culminated in a Human Centered Design workshop during which our team synthesized what we had learned, brainstormed potential fixes, and honed our solutions into an approach ready to prototype. Here’s some of what we learned:

Eager for enterprise
The individuals we engaged with during our design process fled South Sudan with nothing. In the year-and a half that they have been settled, they have been dependent on the in-kind donations provided to them. Now, they need stuff. They need new clothes and shoes that fit. They need sauce pans and Jeri (gas) cans. They want to eat meat, and eggs, chew sugar cane, drink juice. They want cosmetics and jewelry. These market opportunities are generally untapped; the small supply can’t meet the demand that is quickly growing as people have increasing financial flexibility. In response, we’re building on our existing business selection processes to teach refugee participants to evaluate these ever-growing markets and to select businesses most likely to be profitable and sustainable.

Integration through entrepreneurship
The vast majority of South Sudanese refugees have been settled in the West Nile region, which is one of the poorest and most vulnerable sub-regions in Uganda. There is a critical need for interventions that address poverty within the host community as well as in refugee communities and to integrate the two populations. What we learned, is that there isn’t just a need, there is a vested interest on the part of refugees to engage with host communities. Refugees aren’t just willing to start businesses and engage in trade with their hosts, they are eager to do so. Working together means access to two different markets: refugee and host communities, and with it, potential for higher value, more profitable businesses. We’ve designed a pilot approach in which we form business and savings groups that contain both host and refugee community members. A community liaison from the host community works with a business mentor from the refugee community to support cohesion and boost potential.

Leveraging linkages
Refugees have a unique set of needs, and to meet them, there are typically a plethora of interventions to fill them. For example, psychosocial support and protection programs are designed to address trauma and vulnerabilities. Education is needed to keep kids learning despite having been displaced. Livelihood programs can’t work in a silo. Programs like ours offer a strong foundation to integrate with other programs and ensure sure that as a whole, a consortium of actors can offer a holistic approach to increasing resilience. We’ve built room for linking our participants to other vital services in our adapted program, leveraging our business mentor model, which offers a platform for household level need-evaluation and carefully counselled referrals. For example, should a business mentor identify a business ready for next-level market linkages, they can link that business to value chain services. If they notice a family in need of psychosocial support, they can connect that family to actors within the settlement providing those services.

We’re new to the refugee space, and we’re excited to keep learning. What we do know is that there are 156,000 entrepreneurs across East Africa who have started small businesses and changed the lives of their families after participating in our program. We also know that there are over a million refugees in Uganda eager to achieve self-reliance. We’re excited to bringing our life-changing program to a new group of soon-to-be entrepreneurs.

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Over the past few weeks, our innovations team held mentoring workshops in each of our offices. Business mentors gathered for two days to share their triumphs and failures as well as their best practices. The innovations team will now aggregate these practices into a new mentoring manual. This manual will contain the collective wisdom of all of our business mentors and serve as resource guide and reference. Additionally, the mentoring manual will be used as a key technical assistance offering to other organizations seeking best practices around mentoring businesses at the bottom of the pyramid.

Topics at the mentoring workshop ranged from best practices in rearing goats and pigs to how to helpfully intervene in instances of domestic abuse. Our business mentors come from a variety backgrounds and have unique strengths. Prior to the workshop, we identified business mentors’ various areas of expertise and asked them to come prepared to share best practices with the team. Here are some examples.

Field Coordinator, Nathaniel Maiyo shares an example of a time he successfully mentored a business.

Free shampoos and smaller cabbages: unexpected business advice

The innovative spirit is alive and well in our business mentors. For instance, when planting crops like cabbages or watermelons, farmers will often leave significant space between each seed to allow for large harvests. Eldoret business mentor, Nelson Kemboi, advises his business owners to instead limit space between seeds, producing smaller cabbages. Most of our business’ clientele have little disposable income. When business owners can sell smaller cabbages in higher quantity at a price accessible to their clientele, they accrue higher revenue than if they were selling large cabbages at a high price.

Another suggestion came from Nelson’s colleague, Fred Stingo. When some of Stingo’s business owners started a salon, he innovated a stellar way to market their business. Rather than charging for a shampoo and a style separately, Stingo suggested that the business owners combine the services, slightly raising the price of a styling, but marketing the wash for free. Sure enough, a free shampoo with a styling session was a hit!

Ibrahim shares his best mentoring practices

Mentoring beyond the business

Ibrahim, a business mentor in Hoima, provided the team with phenomenal advice on how to provide emotional and motivational support and encouragement to business owners throughout the program. For example, when Ibrahim presents examples of poor business management, he avoids using the names of business owners in the group because he recognizes that this might make a business owner feel discouraged. However, when he brings positive examples, he does use the names of group members because he has found that doing so encourages business owners to emulate the good behavior.

Thomas in Lira, Uganda, is an example of how to use personal experience and empathy to support mentoring. Thomas shared that he motivates his business owners by sharing his own personal story. Having grown up in an extremely poor household, Thomas was able to lift himself out of poverty thru creative business: he sold mandazi in the early morning. His business skills are a lesson to all his now students: he gave tasters to groups of boda drivers to get them hooked! He is able to use these life examples of hope and motivation for this business owners.

Bottom-up works

We are dedicated to bottom-up innovations, not because a bottom-up approach is trendy, but because our long experience shows it works. Our business mentors are our best sources on the information needed to succeed in the communities where we work. The mentoring workshops were an exciting opportunity to harness the knowledge that exists among our business mentors in a way that will better inform our programming, and hopefully improve implementation of similar programs. Growing smaller cabbages to reach the right clientele or sharing a personal story may like simple interventions, but examples like these are the key to innovating for the bottom of the pyramid.

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Innovation conjures images of people in white coats examining test tubes with awe. Or the CEO of a trendy tech start up, dressed all in black, introducing a revolutionary technology. Innovation makes us think of spur of the moment ideas and historical discoveries.

You might not think that small church with dirt floors in Kicunda village, Uganda, 30 km from the nearest town center could be a hub of innovation. But at Village Enterprise, villages like Kicunda are our labs and staff members like Mildred Wengozi are our innovators in white coats.

Yesterday I accompanied Mildred as she conducted an audit on a module we are piloting on business planning. We designed this tool to empower our business owners, many of whom are illiterate and have never attended secondary school, to plan for the various activities that will make their business successful.

Mildred explains the audit process to our business owners.

Mildred and I sat with business owner after business owner asking questions about their use of the tool, probing as much as possible. Designing tools like these for the ultra poor requires in-depth feedback. Lacking formal education, our business owners often do not have strong critical thinking and problem solving skills. As such, our tool needs to provide both a concrete tool for immediate use as well as foster the soft skills needed to complete the process in the future. Gauging its success in both of those areas is a multi-step, labor-intensive process.

Innovation is core to who we are as an organization–it is in our DNA. Our SMART tool (Smart Market Analysis Risk Tool) was recognized as one of the Rockefeller Foundation’s top 100 next century innovations. We are also immensely proud to be on the cutting edge of using Taroworks and Salesforce to digitize our Monitoring and Evaluation (M & E) systems. But what I love most about our innovations team, and what I think makes Village Enterprise’s innovations so extraordinary, is that Mildred and I returned from a day in ‘the lab’ in a local taxi, covered in dust, having spent a day making sure that we are innovating with and for our business owners. Our innovations are bottom up.

One of my favorite examples is our Family Support module. Our Business Mentors (field staff responsible for training and mentoring our business owners) reported that many women business owners were struggling to maintain high savings and invest in profitable businesses because they did not have the support of their husbands and families. Saving money each week for growing a business requires sacrifice and family buy in. For example,  it could mean that a family is eating chapati or meat less often or foregoing sugar in their tea in order to put a small sum of money away each week for the future.

Out of this need, our innovations team went to work designing a “Family Support” module. The module is the one of our first trainings. Business owners are encouraged to attend with their spouses and children. Family Support is now cited by our business owners as one of the most helpful trainings. In fact, one of our business owners, Ronald Okello, was so inspired when he attended the family support module with his wife, Jessica, that he continued to attend trainings and even began to train others in his community based on what he learned.

Business Mentor, Chris, trains business owners in Kicunda Village on business planning.

Innovating from the bottom up requires an established process. What starts as a problem, like female participants not being supported by their families, must inspire an idea–a solution. This idea must then be translated into a feasible implementation strategy. Our business mentors must then be trained on the strategy and why it is important. Next, we have to develop an M&E plan to determine how we will evaluate the piloted innovation’s effectiveness. The pilot must be rigorously monitored and evaluated to determine if it should be integrated into our program. This process requires thinking critically about how best to adapt implementation to our demographic. It requires Mildred and the rest of the innovations team to spend hours on public transportation and engaging with business owners. It is rarely glamorous, but it works.

At Village Enterprise we pride ourselves on combining rigor and cutting edge programming with interventions that work for the very bottom of the pyramid. Our system of innovations illustrates how when you’re working for the bottom of the pyramid, innovation must be driven from the bottom up. And while rural Uganda is not the most likely of innovations hubs, we’ve found it to be the best of laboratories.

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