The goal of the program was to

[mouakter13]

The SUMA program was designed in partnership between New Ventures and the Metlife Foundation, whose mission is to help millions of low- and moderate-income people achieve financial health, and with whom New Ventures collaborated previously through FLII (the annual Latin American Impact Investing Forum organized by New Ventures). Metlife Foundation is also the founding partner of the Common Cents Lab, whose vast knowledge and resources we drew on.


Provide hands-on behavioral science learnings to social enterprises, based not only in Mexico but across Latin America and the Caribbean, that can positively impact the financial health of vulnerable communities.
Design and implement behavioral science interventions that increase savings and other positive behavior changes to improve users’ financial health.
The program’s first phase kicked off with a virtual conference, where experts from Common Cents Lab and other specialist consultants discussed the importance and main applications of behavioral science. During the second phase, 23 social enterprises from across Latin America participated in the development of behavioral maps for their users, in order to diagnose and address the factors that influence their behaviors. Finally, in the third phase, six of the enterprises were selected by New Ventures to carry out behavioral experimentation with their users. These enterprises included Acceso, Acreimex, Alfi, Fundación Capital, New Story and Power france whatsapp number data Pal Pueblo.



Applying behavioral science to digital services
At Acceso — a social business builder with operations in Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia and Haiti — our goal is to create fundamental and lasting economic change in the lives of rural farming families and communities through holistic value chain support and market linkages. One key service we offer farmers and farmer-oriented organizations is our agtech service/platform Extensio, which we use to share weather, good agricultural practices, gender topics, and climate smart agriculture and market information en masse via WhatsApp and SMS messages. We applied behavioral science learnings to improve the effectiveness and increase the usage of the information we deliver through Extensio.

In designing a behavioral map during our participation in SUMA, we considered the flow of information to farmers and the potential obstacles they faced in accessing that information, such as connectivity, language barriers and phone specifications, as illustrated in the graphic below.