How do you measure impact when there is a dearth of data? Our origin story.
Creating income generating opportunities, especially for women, is huge business in the development world. Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) currently serve approximately 200 million people and 1.7 billion people remain without access to financial services. However, in an industry where financial inclusion is touted as a pathway out of poverty, where exactly is the evidence for this? Repayment data is simply not enough to point to livelihood improvement, because repayments only prove an ability to repay a loan, not an ability to actually grow a business. Unless an MFI can prove definitively that the repayment came from the profits of a business and not for example, personal savings, borrowing from friends and relatives, or worse other lenders, it’s very difficult to prove livelihood improvement.
For close to 400 million microenterprises in emerging markets and their supporting organizations, there is a fundamental lack of good quality data.
This is because microenterprises often keep no records or, at best, pen & and paper ones, leaving expensive and time consuming manual collection by supporting organizations.
This was the experience of ENVenture, a social enterprise lender in Uganda, who sought a scalable, affordable and simple mobile and cloud-based data collection and analysis tool. Through hours and hours of interviews and user-centric design, their Executive Director sought to answer why technology was not embraced for business management. Their answer was that no technology had been created for them in mind. Most software was too complicated, required internet which was too expensive, and required a computer which many did not own. After all, how many enterprise tech companies are founded by people with experience working in or with microenterprises? Thus ENVision mobile was formed by three like-minded founders with experience working with microenterprises in emerging markets.
That’s us — the data geeks — we have a mobile android app to collect the data and will have a beautiful cloud based dashboard for analysis ready by January 2019!
But to get our launch right we are calling on the expertise of Microfinance
Institutions, Distributors, and Non-profits that support microenterprise
development. We need your help!
We believe (based on desk and field research) that it costs cash, time and
overheads to collect quality data — think the field officer who gets a taxi or boda-boda each week to meet users/customers, copies the data into Excel, verifies it, and then analyzes it on the office systems for insights.
Using ENVision will save everyone time and money and give added benefits to all parties beyond even the best practices of the old system. There will always be a need for a manual element for support and verification (we can’t automate everything!), but this way we get more accurate data in a bigger set for analysis/insight and free up time for training and other supporting activities.
If you are a small business, help us by filling in our market research survey or, even better, by getting in touch so we can discuss running a pilot and interview you over the phone.
If you are a Financial Service Provider / MFI — please fill out this survey.
If you are a Social enterprise involved in product distribution via sales agents or micro-entrepreneurs — please fill out this survey.
To find out more about the app, check out our website or read our next blog where we’ll discuss the type of impact data we want to collect and the analysis we want to run.
