A year of rapid response at ONOW
ONOW was fortunate to be well-positioned for a strong response to COVID-19, and rapid growth during 2020.
Making Sense of a Strange Year
To make sense of a strange year, ONOW is looking back at seven developments and achievements from 2020. Efforts to support underserved business owners to grow their businesses continued throughout the year.
The common thread of the year was clearly the importance of combining tech with touch for building capacity in entrepreneurship, financial capabilities, and access to finance. In a country like Myanmar, touch still plays an important role in building trust and closing finance gaps.
1: Supporting 58,000 Business Owners during COVID-19
When the COVID-19 crisis shut markets down in Myanmar in March, ONOW immediately sought to understand the challenge to our portfolio of businesses.
This gave way to ONOW’s involvement with Youth Business International’s Rapid Response Recovery Programme, funded by Google.org, to support struggling small businesses during the COVID-19 crisis.
In 2020, ONOW:
- supported 58,000 Myanmar businesses of all sizes and in all regions,
- helped preserve 20,000 jobs,
- and directly coached more than 6,500 businesses.
- more than 16,000 businesses say they have been helped by ONOW.
The most important part of this initiative was not the large numbers of businesses supported, but the number of businesses who were engaged in deep coaching interactions with ONOW coaches. The technology facilitated this, but it was the human connection between coach and business owner that resulted in better decision-making in the midst of crisis.
ONOW rapidly spun up an automated coaching chatbot platform, called ONOW Sont Oo (a word for “entrepreneur” in Burmese) to facilitate the provision of important recovery information, the capture of business impact insights, and the scheduling of thousands of coaching phone calls.
“Since the COVID-19 pandemic breakout, I was forced to stop running my business, but I want to resume my business as soon as possible. I will need coaching support and a better understanding of the digital economy from ONOW.” — Business Owner supported by ONOW
Read more about ONOW’s COVID response here, and read YBI’s interview of ONOW here. Read a story about Htu Luan, one of our entrepreneurs here.
2: Completion of the Miller Center GSBI Accelerator Program
Starting in late 2019, and continuing throughout 2020, ONOW participated in the Miller Center’s second Social Entrepreneurship at the Margins cohort of the renowned GSBI accelerator program.
ONOW received great guidance from excellent mentors, and cemented our understanding of our impact model, our business model, and our plan for our future strategic growth.
The mentorship was also instrumental for guiding ONOW’s leadership through navigating the COVID economic crisis, helping to ensure that ONOW never needed cut staffing or salaries during the economic slow down.
Read more about the second Social Entrepreneurship at the Margins Cohort here, and see the enterprise profiles from our cohort here. ONOW’s pitch can be viewed here, which was shaped for the culminating virtual In-Residence.
3: Winning the UNCDF Women’s Financial and Digital Literacy Challenge
In 2020, ONOW won a competitive pitch for the UNCDF Women’s Financial and Digital Literacy Challenge, in partnership with UKAID. Our pitch focused on delivering financial education through our scalable technology platform in conflict affected areas of Myanmar, and was selected by the Investment Committee.
For ONOW’s target customers, the underserved domestic migrant young women who are typically working in factories, there are a number of intersecting needs. This segment is
- the least likely to have access to finance,
- least likely to understand how to use their mobile phones to improve their economic prospects,
- and least likely to start a business.
In order to incubate businesses among these women, we often work on the foundational issues of Financial and Digital Literacy as well.
Through the UNCDF Women’s Financial and Digital Literacy Challenge, ONOW is educating thousands of rural women in Kayin, Mon and Shan States, and connecting them to financial service providers where they will open new financial accounts. ONOW will also provide entrepreneurship training and coaching to thousands of these women.
So far, more than 3,500 women have accessed the digital platform, with nearly 1,000 completing digital or financial literacy modules. ONOW personally coaches each women who requests access to information about financial institutions, connecting with 530 women already.
Read more about the Financial and Digital Literacy Challenge in UNCDF Myanmar’s July 2020 newsletter.
4: Supporting the European Union‘s Myan Ku Factory Worker Cash Fund
When the COVID pandemic shut down economies around the world, Myanmar’s growing factory zones were hit hard by the sudden collapse of demand and resulting work stoppages. The EU Myan Ku Fund was quickly set up by the European Union as a rapid response measure to alleviate the socio-economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on predominantly female garment workers. A series of cash transfers were designed to ease the sudden disappearance of income.
As an organization focused on meeting the needs of these mostly migrant factory workers, ONOW partnered with the Myan Ku fund to provide three important services to these factory workers:
- Post Cash Distribution Monitoring to ensure funds were flowing as expected, and to understand the sentiment and experience of the transfer recipients. ONOW has connected with nearly 1300 transfer recipients.
- Financial Literacy training and facilitation of access to cash transfer service providers. We set up a special chatbot for the support fund, to facilitate sign-ups for the program, provide financial education messaging, and to provide direct referrals to the Wave Money mobile wallet provider.
- Entrepreneurship training and coaching services to help factory workers without jobs create their own businesses and access to finance. ONOW is providing these services to up to 300 factory workers who will open their own businesses.
Factory workers in Myanmar often run their own small businesses alongside their factory work, as a supplement to their incomes.
These business owners are more resilient to economic crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and ONOW is working to build their foundational skills and help them navigate difficult economic times.
5: The DaNa Facility’s 2020 Fintech Challenge Myanmar Shortlist
We were very proud to be listed among some of the leading fintechs in Myanmar The DaNa Facility hosted the 2020 Fintech Challenge Myanmar, which was organized “to identify and pilot fintech solutions that can dramatically expand financial inclusion in Myanmar.”
ONOW was a shortlisted finalist among 11 fintechs based in Myanmar. ONOW’s problem statement centered on the problems of financial literacy and MSME financing, together with our financial institution partner VisionFund Myanmar. Watch a draft screen capture of our DaNa FCM presentation.
ONOW also participated in Deep Dives on the problems identified as Priority Verticals for the Ministry of Planning, Finance, and Industry and the Central Bank of Myanmar.
6: A growing team
ONOW has grown significantly over the past three years, and 2020 accelerated this growth. We were fortunate to find the funding we needed for both launching our COVID Response and to pursue our strategic initiatives for positioning the company for our future growth. We’re now a team of 48!
We had a net increase of nearly 20 team members (we call ourselves ONOWers) this year, as we added new capabilities in data science, artificial intelligence and customer relationship management, alongside chatbot development, training and coaching.
ONOW is 2/3rds female, more than 1/2 migrant, and our senior management is 57% female. Our average age is 25. This is the best part of our job!
7: A purposeful look and feel
In 2020, we developed a more cohesive brand, a brand statement and brand values to match our commitment to serving female migrants.
The look and feel is more friendly and less sharp, and our values reflect our desire to build confidence in women who typically wouldn’t be chosen for an incubation program!
Supporting Female Business Owners into 2021
Late in 2020, ONOW was fortunate to partner with the Sasakawa Peace Foundation to develop new technology to facilitate business modeling, startup and access to finance for underserved entrepreneurs. The results from a pilot will be coming out in early 2021!
ONOW was also mentioned in a report on “The Role of Entrepreneurship in Closing Gender Gaps in Myanmar”.
Throughout 2021, ONOW will continue to gather rapid insights from across Myanmar on the ongoing impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic and resultant economic crisis. Some of this will take place in partnership with Innovations for Poverty Action. Keep watching this space for more on how Myanmar businesses and households are coping.
Happy New Year in 2021, and go well as we all work to support entrepreneurs around the world!
Who is ONOW?
ONOW enables female migrants in Myanmar to become empowered entrepreneurs who are financially capable. ONOW’s business incubator helps a woman
- connect to formal financial systems,
- become digitally literate,
- validate her business idea,
- find startup capital, and
- launch the business.
ONOW supports these businesses for up to two years through individualized coaching and problem solving. Since 2012, ONOW has helped more than 500 people launch enterprises, and has coached more than 8,000 households. ONOW’s digital platforms have reached more than 300,000 users, and has connected more than 30,000 to their first formal financial accounts.
ONOW is a member of the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs, and an alum of the Miller Center GSBI Social Entrepreneurship at the Margins Accelerator.
