Are your economic development interventions having any impact?
If you’ve worked in economic development, I know that you’ve had this feeling. You just ran a training on marketing, accounting, pricing, or any other topic aimed at micro-, small-, and medium-enterprises. The participants were engaged and the scores on the post-tests were much stronger than the pre-tests. But as you walk back to your car/ shut down your Zoom, you can’t help but ask yourself, “Will this training have any real impact on their business?”
So you, being someone who entered this challenging field because you want to make a true impact, commission a follow-up study. You make phone calls. Some go through and some don’t. You ask the trainees if they are making more money, but they don’t know because their records are incomplete. So you decide to get in the car, travel upcountry, and actually visit the site. And at the end of days of work, hundreds (or thousands) of dollars, you end up shrugging and just reporting on the post-test results anyway.
I know this feeling, because I have been there. Monitoring and Evaluating the performance of small businesses, especially in an emerging market context, is hard. Usually, the business is not even monitoring and evaluating their own performance. It’s frustrating and it drives “realists” in the development industry to focus on outputs rather than outcomes. It doesn’t have to be this way.
OZÉ is an app designed for and with entrepreneurs to help them form the habit of keeping digital financial records. Thousands of MSME owners across Ghana and Nigeria are using it to track their business performance and make better decisions. For the business owner, digital records allow them to build a credit history, see changes in their performance in real-time, more efficiently collect payments from customers, and more.
For Entrepreneurship-Support-Organizations (ESOs), development agencies, NGOs, governments, or any organization supporting MSMEs, their digital records give you a real-time understanding of your impact. The days of endless phone calls asking MSMEs to tell you how much they have earned last month are over. With OZE Enterprise, M&E doesn’t have to spend all of their time trying to understand impact. Instead, they can use real-time data to improve and tailor interventions. It’s time that real-time performance data is used for development so that we can stop wondering if we are making an impact and actually make one.
If you want to learn how OZÉ Enterprise can make you a more data-driven organization, send me an email at meghan@oze.guru or schedule a meeting here.
