Context

Over the course of 5 years, Shalu led IDEO.org’s relationship with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Financial Services for the Poor (FSP team). At the beginning of the collaboration, the work was focused on investigating why mobile money was not taking off across several countries. The work slowly evolved into building disseminating user segments, and finally building prototypes with partners in countries.

The Collaboration 

Research and shareback: The IDEO.org team spoke to 250 women across six countries: Bangladesh, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Tanzania—partnering with data scientists, behavioral scientists, and gender experts to strengthen our design research. The work resulted in the production of a global Women and Money report.

Sector facilitation: The team held a convening at the Women’s World Banking Forum in Singapore in October 2019, where the findings from the work were shared in an interactive exhibit, with sessions that enabled the team to get further examples and refinement from practitioners.

Partner engagement: In the final phases of this collaboration with the Gates Foundation, the team started building solutions with in-country organizations. One example is the Boda Pesa project. In communities where women may walk 10-30km to their nearest agent, Boda Pesa links aggregated demand for products and services in rural areas with agents who can meet consumers at their doorstep. Boda Pesa was developed in partnership with BOMA Project and PesaKit, and in collaboration with Safaricom. We launched a pilot in November 2021 that will reach 1,000 women in Northern Kenya.