The Future is Now

Yolanda Walker is a South African living and working in the US. She is a graduate of Oberlin College, where she studied Economics. During her college career she studied International Business in France and Mandarin in China. Yolanda also lived in Ghana, where she volunteered at an orphanage. Most recently, Yolanda volunteered with Grameen Foundation’s Capital Markets team through our skills-based volunteer initiative, Bankers without Borders®. An associate at Capital Group Companies, an investment management company, Yolanda is based in California.

Bankers without Borders volunteer Yolanda Walker (center) attends a borrower’s group meeting in Kenya.

One of the many perks of being a part of The Associate’s Program (TAP) at Capital Group Companies is having the opportunity to leave our company for four to five months and completely immerse ourselves in a non-profit organization – with the flexibility to choose any organization, in any industry. As I was contemplating my various service opportunities, a manager at Capital Group handed me a book about a group of individuals whose lives were affected by microfinance. As I perused the document, it became clear to me that this emerging form of finance fosters genuine empowerment for marginalized communities. I was hooked.

I grew up in a family of six that, for many years, survived on only $4 a day. My personal experience enabled me to closely relate to the issues that microfinance clients face. Growing up outside of Cape Town, I knew hunger, and remember often having to stand in food lines when my parents couldn’t afford to feed us. I knew about sleeping in the cold and dark. I knew, at age 10, what it meant to have a job, as I swept classrooms after school in exchange for a loaf of bread. I also knew the fear of potentially having to drop out of school – like my brothers – to take on another job that would bring extra money into our household.

These vivid and profoundly life altering elements of poverty were very real for me as a child. So, how did an individual like me end up working at one of the biggest mutual fund companies in the world? My response: hard work, chance encounters and the grace of God.

When I read about the impact of microfinance around the world, I became fascinated and wanted to know more. As I learned more about it, Grameen Foundation quickly became the obvious choice for my non-profit rotation.

Mobile Money Savings Systems: What Do Users Think?

Grameen Foundation’s Lisa Kienzle, Olga Morawczynski and Ali Ndiwalana recently co-authored a blog post with Ignacio Mas on the blog Mobile Active. Here they  introduce and user-test one concept of savings: deferred payments over mobile money. Below is an excerpt, followed by a link to the full post.

Grameen Foundation’s AppLab Money believes that mobile money is essentially a liquidity-management platform. Put differently, it could be described as LiFi: Connecting people to an electronic payment system via their mobile phones that provides Liquidity with Fidelity. What does it take to turn mobile money systems into a full-fledged savings platform? A full savings proposition would address these additional key elements:

• Mechanisms to help people link their savings vehicles to particular savings purposes or spending goals
• Incentives and discipline mechanisms to help customers set money aside into their savings vehicle(s), or “discipline in”
• Incentive and discipline mechanisms to help people keep money in their savings vehicle(s) once it is saved, or “discipline out.”

The challenge is how to optimize the mobile money environment by adding these sorts of features without making mobile money so complex and unwieldy that it is difficult or impossible to manage on simple mobile phones.

Read the full post on the MobileActive blog >>

Turning Insights into Products: Gambling on Applab Money

Our Applab Money initative focuses on researching, prototyping and testing innovative financial products to reach poor people who don’t typically have access to these resources. Project Manager Olga Morawczynski and Operations and Strategy Manager Lisa Kienzle recently wrote on the CGAP blog about the need to develop creative products that focus on existing customer desires, use patterns, and needs. One example: using the idea of gaming and gambling to create a helpful product for poor people.

Arthur plays a popular board game called Ludo.

What follows is one example of an interesting insight that emerged on a recent field visit that could be translated into a product that poor customers could find exciting: on our trip, we noticed that everyone loves gambling.

While visiting a village in East Africa, we met a farmer named Arthur who enjoyed gambling in his spare time. We watched him spend $2 as an entrance fee to join three other players in a popular board game called Ludo (see photo). Arthur lost this round, and the entire pot of $8 was handed over to his neighbor. When asked why he played if there was a risk of loss, Arthur explained that the potential returns were very high – in fact, it would take him one week of intensive labor (such as digging on his neighbor’s farm) to earn what he could win from one round of Ludo. If he won the pot, he would set aside half as an “emergency fund” for his family to protect against shocks – such as an unexpected illness – and reinvest the rest into the game.

Imagine, they said, what would happen if Arthur had access to a formal financial product that provided a safeguard against emergencies, but the sensation of a game.

Read the full post on the CGAP blog.

Delivering New Services for the Poor

The Mobile World Congress has ended, but the excitement generated by discussions of helping the poor through mobile phones remains high. For those of us working in international development, it was heartening to see this issue no longer relegated to “corner discussions” or side conversations in the hallways between sessions. As noted by Heather Thorne, Grameen Foundation’s Vice President for Information Solutions, this time the valuable role of mobile phones in global development was front and center. Telecom operators and others are now seeing the opportunities for developing products and services for the poor.

One highlight for Grameen Foundation was the announcement of our collaboration with MTN Uganda and CGAP to research and develop mobile financial products for the poor. The need is clear: 2.7 billion people – most of whom live in developing countries – still do not have a bank account. This is largely because many low-income communities are underserved by financial institutions, which typically offer products that are more suitable for higher-income clientele.

Though the growing number of mobile money services is helping to address the access issue, we still need products that are appropriate for low-income consumers. Our goal with this new initiative is to drive innovation that can yield a full array of services that are affordable and accessible for poor clients, while being commercially viable for the financial service providers involved.

Ensuring that Healthcare for the Poor Is Just a Call Away

The annual Mobile World Congress is the place to see the latest mobile phones and applications before they hit the market. But that’s not why Tim Wood is there. As director of Grameen Foundation’s Mobile Health initiative, he’s more interested in how the mobile industry can help improve health outcomes for people who can barely afford a $20 phone.

Tim was part of a panel discussion on mobile health for development – the first of its kind to be held at a Mobile World Congress. He hopes this will galvanize even greater awareness of, and support for, the life-changing opportunities that a simple phone can provide to poor people around the world.

Grameen Foundation’s Mobile Health solutions focus on improving patient care for the poor by helping healthcare providers become more efficient, and by making modern medical information easily accessible and relevant to the poor themselves. In Ghana, we have been working through our MOTECH initiative with the Ghana Health Service on a “Mobile Midwife” service that sends weekly messages to pregnant women and new mothers reminding them of appointments and providing health tips that reinforce advice from their local nurses. In addition, nurses can update their clients’ data on their mobile phones and access their records as needed. Since 2010, we have registered more than 11,000 pregnant women and families in the country’s remote Upper East Region.

Be sure to follow our coverage of the Mobile World Congress 2012 to learn more about how we can deliver products and services to poor, rural communities through the 4 billion phones that are already in developing countries and emerging markets.