Access to financial services among rural women in developing countries is extremely low, even below the global access rate for their male counterparts living on an average of $2 a day. This lack of access to financial services leads to an inability to mitigate economic shocks or take advantage of investment opportunities. It also has a lasting impact on the entire household.
ChangeLabs worked with the Financial Services for the Poor (FSP) group to frame strategic and innovative approaches, and extend digital financial services for rural women across East Africa. Both organizations worked on a joint workshop that brought together 26 experts, practitioners, and strategic partners from critical target regions across East Africa, as well as senior members of The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The objective of this hands-on, co-creative workshop was to frame and identify novel and actionable opportunities to extend digital financial services to communities in East Africa. The two-day workshop focused on addressing the following two questions:
1. Where to amplify impact at the human and system level?
2. How to move specific levers in novel and actionable ways?
The project resulted in four high-impact approaches. ChangeLabs choreographed a co-creation process, identified key insights, moderated a stakeholder and ecosystem analysis, helped the group frame strategic pathways, led the design of an intervention strategy, and proposed a deep intervention.