Boosting the digital skills of women retailers in Nigeria
The following is a guest post co-written by Strive Community partner Boost and the Growing Businesses Foundation.
Boost is a B2B commerce platform offering digital ordering and credit services to power growth for Africa’s 100 million micro- and small retailers. We provide radically easy technology to help distributors and retailers grow. We offer effortless WhatsApp ordering to digitize demand and data-light apps to manage fulfillment and payments, which enables distributors to gain control of and visibility for their business. Once retailers are ordering on our platform, they can access embedded working capital (we call this “Stock Boosts”) so that they can match their supply with demand.
Boost is building on a strong foundation of empowering women entrepreneurs…
In Nigeria, Boost serves as the digitization partner to the Shakti Women’s Empowerment Program, a Unilever and Growing Businesses Foundation (GBF) initiative to empower female retail entrepreneurs across the country. The initiative derives its name from India, where Unilever empowered socio-economically encumbered women in semi-urban and rural areas to overcome obstacles, grow thriving businesses, and become self-reliant entrepreneurs. Leveraging GBF’s deep expertise in Nigeria on empowering rural entrepreneurs through its trust-based outreach model, Shakti Nigeria was born to design and scale a community-based business model to enable Unilever to reach peri-urban and rural areas where the brand was not easily accessed. What started as a pilot of 100 women in Ibadan in 2014 grew to over 5,000 confident and self-reliant female entrepreneurs impacting over 400,000 households across 17 states in Nigeria by the beginning of 2022.
… to digitalize their businesses and increase their digital confidence.
Over the last year, Boost supported GBF’s senior management, providing real-time monitoring of field operations, as the team doubled the Shakti Nigeria network to 10,000 women in line with the Unilever–GBF shared 2022 goal. As an outcome of the digitalization process, GBF was able to expand the scope of operations of each field agent, doubling the number of women each one called on daily.
Boost has enabled women to build their digital skills, greatly expanding the scope of products that can be introduced into their businesses. With the launch of our program Project IKE, in partnership with Strive Community and CGAP in the second half of last year, we have been developing and testing new services that combine data analysis, behavioral science, and conversational commerce to empower small retailers with business and purchasing insights to drive resilience in their business, while increasing their confidence in digital products.
Technology is a critical enabler in scaling the GBF–Unilever Shakti initiative, in terms of ensuring rural women entrepreneurs benefit from improved cost efficiencies and timely product delivery. Boost’s services are designed to make access to digital ordering and credit services as seamless as possible. Retailers access Boost via WhatsApp, a familiar channel to most of our customers regardless of their digital experience. Boost’s conversational commerce experience enables retailers to register, place orders (via a very data-light web app), and receive invoices and updates about their orders. All payments from retailers are also captured digitally on Boost’s platform and reflected on customer statements available to the retailer over WhatsApp. Once retailers start ordering with Boost, we offer them “Stock Boosts” to unlock missed sales and grow their margin.
Impacting the livelihoods and enhancing the skills of women retailers using trusted channels and real-time, data-driven insights
Existing research shows that women are 25% less likely to be digitally empowered or technologically savvy compared to men. Through our project with Strive Community, Boost intends to show women the technology they already use to converse can also be used for their business with clear advantages for adoption, with 97% of the 204 women surveyed for this project reported using WhatsApp. Working in partnership with GBF’s field team — who extensively train women in business skills and offer continuous support in sales and logistics management on a daily basis — Boost was able to layer additional training for the women through GBF’s community-based model, an existing, trusted channel. This created a multiplier effect for us: giving one GBF field agent confidence in our platform enabled us to reach 20 to 40 women entrepreneurs. Additionally, by working with field team members from the same communities as the women, we could position our platform in the most locally relevant context. This trusted channel proved its value; of the first 40 women entrepreneurs who took a Stock Boost, 60% had never taken any form of a loan before and only did so because of the way it was introduced — through the trusted GBF field team.
In launching Shakti Nigeria, Unilever and GBF emphasized that their main goal was to impact the livelihoods, confidence, and self-esteem of women by enhancing their skills and entrepreneurial mindsets. Boost is very conscious of staying true to this mission. Digital ordering and credit services for micro- and small convenience retailers are not novel to emerging markets. Most, though, focus on supply management and supply chain efficiency with the majority of the benefits absorbed by manufacturers upstream. However, Project IKE focuses on offering data-driven insights to retailers in addition to the standard features provided by other commerce platforms. IKE uses transactional data to offer retailers real-time insights about their businesses to drive improved outcomes. For example, we’re transforming retailers’ order histories into digestible insights so they can better understand the health and patterns of their business to make more informed decisions. Currently, retailers have shown an interest in data that impacts immediate business decisions, such as price changes and out-of-stock notifications sent over WhatsApp.
If successful, our project will lead to improved retailer business confidence, growth in retailer profitability, and higher levels of engagement with Boost’s platform. We will also provide valuable learnings for the sector on how best to effectively deploy digital-first solutions to small retailers to maximize impact and uptake. Stay tuned as we share our experiences and insights from this project.
