Rural Stars: Meet the Women Agents Bringing Financial Access to Rural Indonesia
Meeting with star agents in Sulawesi
We’ve written recently about IDEO Last Mile Money’s work extending cash-in/cash-out (CICO) networks to the last mile in Indonesia. In partnership with GrabKios, Cargill, and Mercy Corps Indonesia, we activated digital financial agents by onboarding farmers to disburse agricultural payments within their communities in rural Sulawesi — ultimately delivering funds to farmers in less than three days, versus the standard six months.
In the process, we learned many interesting things. Today, we want to share our insights on what it takes to become a high performing agent. World over, not all agents perform at the same level of productivity and efficiency, and some do better than others. As we reviewed the pilot results, “star agents” began to emerge — agents who outshone the others by disproportionately contributing to the gross merchandise value (GMV) and the number/volume of transactions. They averaged GMV 12x that of other agents, and were central to the pilot’s success. Many of them were women: in our pilot, women earned an average of 4x higher income and contributed to 85% of the GMV among the top ten agents.
As the Design Program Manager managing the pilot, I was able to meet many of these stellar women in person, getting to see them in action in their homes and businesses. While their lives and experiences were diverse, they shared several common qualities which set them up for success as rural mobile money agents, including:
- Star agents have strong networks and build on women’s social equity in rural communities, making women some of the most powerful agents
- Star agents are highly entrepreneurial in growing their business, making them eager to discover new opportunities for income
- Star agents are likely to be leaders in their communities, which helps them achieve outsized impact
In this piece, I’ll introduce some of the star agents I met and what set them apart.
1. Star agents have strong networks and build on women’s social equity in rural communities, making women some of the most powerful agents
In general, successful agents are socially-connected and economically-motivated. They tend to have a similar profile in both education and entrepreneurial experience; often they are kiosk owners or even farmers. However, what surprised us most was that most of our top-performing agents were women.
Due to their social equity in rural communities, many of the female agents we worked with were empowered to pursue new business opportunities. Although many of the women using the GrabKios app for our pilot were new to the platform, they brought a wealth of contacts and prior connections they could reach out to in order to increase their agent income beyond what was incentivized through the pilot.
When I think about this, I think about an agent I met from the pilot named Kasma from Village Tettikengrarae, population 7,403. When we visited her in her home, it was stacked floor to ceiling with a variety of sizes and shapes of tupperware: Kasma is an enterprising tupperware saleswoman. When we spoke, she mentioned she wished she could merge her business verticals to not only sell tupperware through Grab but also buy fertilizer from the same platform. She felt empowered to make her own decisions about her business, and wasn’t afraid to try something new.
Kasma contributed to 158 transactions and a GMV of $867. For reference, the GMV per agent per month target for this pilot was $38, a standard in Tier 2 and 3 cities (compared to $78 in urban areas). Kasma’s monthly GMV averages to $289, a colossal 660% over target.
Kasma is a prime example of how agents who previously had business experience were more likely to thrive as mobile money agents because they had existing networks and a strong social standing they could use to explore additional business opportunities.
2. Star agents are highly entrepreneurial in growing their business, making them eager to discover new opportunities for income
During the pilot many agents sought out and brought on new customers. Beyond the initial farmers identified for the pilot, agents brought on an additional 800 customers — and those new customers represented 91% of total customers serviced throughout the pilot, which generated measurable additional revenue for agents.
Santi is a great example of this. Santi was a star agent who completed 216 transactions over the duration of the pilot, resulting in a GMV of close to US $2,000. She belonged to Village Soga in Sulawesi. Although it’s one of the smaller of the twenty-four villages we selected for the pilot with a population of only 1,500, Santi outpaced many of her peers through her dedication, agility, and astuteness as a mobile money agent.
Santi used her prior training as a BRILink mobile banking agent and converted her business to GrabKios, using her contacts and existing customers as a starting point. She not only offered electricity token payments to farmers and customers, but also offered liquidity to other agents, a challenge faced by many in the CICO space. When asked about her success, Santi shared how her motivation is more than just economic: she dreams of taking her mother to a pilgrimage in Mecca. Through her mobile money agent business, she will likely be able to achieve this dream.
3. Star agents are likely to be leaders in their communities, which helps them achieve outsized impact
Some of the star agents we worked with, like Aris, were leaders in their communities which enabled them to set the trend and encourage others to get on board. Although one of the rare male star agents from our pilot, Aris stood out due to his connection to his community and how he partners with his wife, Noora, to run their business together.
When we visited Aris, he shared with us how he was named one of the World’s Top 50 Best Cocoa Producers in the World — and the only one in Indonesia — by the International Cocoa Awards. His home had certificates to prove these accolades in addition to acknowledgements of his contribution to the farmers group.
In their village of Tettikengrarae (population 7,403), Aris’s wife Noora treated us to a special Eid lunch of fish and sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves, with unfiltered coffee brewed on their open flame stove. As we ate, Aris explained how he is part of a local farmer group, and that he and Noora are running their new mobile money agent business together, leveraging their positions in the farmer group to bring business and make transactions.
In total, Aris and Noora completed 20 transactions, and $122 GMV — lower than other star agents, but with an impressive average transaction size of $6/transaction. This higher volume per transaction was incredibly important in driving GMV, and indicative of the high trust farmers had in transacting with Aris and Noora due to their status as community leaders — customers were willing to risk larger transactions, knowing they could depend on Aris and Noora.
In addition to GrabKios transactions, Aris and Noora were pivotal in brokering a collaboration for an agritech product sales experiment Mercy Corps Indonesia ran alongside the pilot. Bringing farmers together with agricultural and insecticide companies, the couple were responsible for driving sales of 1.7million rupiah worth of fertilizer per agent through the GrabKios app.
What star agents mean for rural communities
As I look back on this project, what stands out to me most is the power of local agents to drive positive change in their communities. I think a lot about Bo Arpina, a woman who runs an agri-kiosk business with her husband in Turrucinae village and dreams of converting the space into an eco-tourism lodge.
Today, Bo Arpina’s farm is a small paradise: sleepy dogs nap while chickens, which are part of her livestock farming practice, cluck about in peace. She has a massive catfish farm too, which she’s brought to profitability after many years of hard work. Her first seventeen fish are still with her, with some of them now grown to their maximum length of just over one meter.
Women like Bo Arpina already bring an incredible richness and vibrancy to their local communities. So, when we were recruiting agents and invited successful people like her to become a GrabKios agent and add yet another business to her busy life, we were pleasantly surprised when she said yes. We think this is because rural entrepreneurs like Bo Arpina can see the potential that a digital platform like GrabKios offer to her and her community: faster payments, digital services, and more opportunities to access the digital economy.
A year ago, we wondered if rural agents could be feasible. That’s before we met star agents like Kasma, Santi, Aris, Noora, and Bo Arpina who exceeded our wildest expectations, as well as our partners’ GMV targets. This suggests to us that there may be many more rural stars waiting to be discovered, supported, and cultivated into a bright constellation of agents serving their rural communities. (And we can’t wait to go stargazing again. 😉)
Stay tuned for the next post in this series, which shares the blueprint for launching a rural agent network!
